Flutter Away with Summarizing!!

Alyssa Gilman

Reading to Learn Lesson Design

Rationale: The main purpose for reading is understanding and comprehension. Summarization is an important strategy for understanding reading. Through this lesson, students will practice their summarization skills by using a graphic organizer to help with the strategies for summarizing. The students will also work on forming a topic sentence from reading an article about butterflies.

Materials:

-Poster with summarization rules to display:

·         Get rid of unimportant information

·         Get rid of repeated information

·         Organize items and events under one broad term

·         Select a topic

·         Write a topic sentence that covers everything that is important from the text

-Article about butterflies, The Hot and Cold of Butterfly Dancing (1 per student) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/feb/01/2) [attached]

-Article about hummingbirds, Hummingbirds (1 per student) (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/01/hummingbirds/klesius-text) [attached]

-Pencil, paper, markers, highlighter (1 per student)

-Dry erase board and marker

- Summarization checklist:

Procedure:

1. I will begin by introducing the comprehension strategy of summarizing to the students. "Today we are going to talk about summarizing. This is a great way to help us understand and remember what we read. Summarizing is kind of like reviewing the most important parts of what you read."

2. Next, I will review our fluency strategy of rereading and crosschecking to understand a sentence that we are having trouble with. "Before we get into summarization, let's remember what we can do if we come across a sentence that we don't quite understand." Write ‘The ants climbed up the hill looking for food.’ "If I read the sentence, 'the ants clinded up the hill looking for food.’ I would think, hmm? That sounds weird, let me read that again. 'The ants cccllliiinnndddeddd up the hill looking for food' clinded? Ohh, climbed! 'The ants climbed up the hill looking for food' Climbing is like walking up an incline. Cross-checking helps you to understand unfamiliar words."

3. Next, we would discuss the rules to summarization. "Now we are going to look at the five rules for summarizing." Show the poster to the students and read the rules out loud. "Now I want you to read this paragraph about butterflies. Once you are done we are going to summarize the paragraph together."

4. "Let's look at our paragraph…Follow along as I read out loud. I especially enjoy learning about the relationships between evolution, ecology and ethology, so I was thrilled when I stumbled across a really sweet scientific paper the other day. This paper investigates the relationship between environment and behavior in a butterfly. Adult butterflies are highly visual animals, relying on their keen eyesight to locate and identify appropriate mates by looking at and comparing their wing colors and patterns. Many butterflies show variations in wing colors and patterns depending upon the season they experienced as caterpillars or whilst cocooning." The first rule on our summarization rules poster says we need to get rid of unimportant information. I am going to mark out the first two sentences because this information is not crucial to know to understand our paragraph. Our next rule is to get rid of any repeated information. I am going to cross out ‘by looking at and comparing their wing colors and patterns’ because we read about the colors and patterns in the next sentence. Now we are ready to organize our facts under one umbrella term, which means we are going to come up with an idea of what our article is about. Let's highlight the important phrases: ‘Adult butterflies are highly visual animals, relying on their keen eyesight to locate and identify appropriate mates by looking at and comparing their wing colors and patterns.' Our broad term is, 'Butterflies depend on their eyesight to see their appropriate mates.' Our next step is to decide on a topic for our summary. I think that the best topic would be 'Butterfly Eyesight' since that is what the paragraph is about. The last step in summarizing is to come up with a topic sentence. The topic sentence is one sentence that recaps the whole paragraph, using only the most important information. So our topic sentence would be, 'Butterflies depend on their eyesight to see their appropriate mates.'" I would write the topic sentence on the board.

5. "Now we are going to practice summarizing with a different article. I want you to read this article to find out some different facts that you might not have known about hummingbirds, and then you are going to summarize it. As you are reading, remember to cross out any information that is not SUPER important to the main idea, or information that is repeated. Highlight the sentences that are important to the main idea of the article. When you are finished, you will write one topic sentence summarizing the most important information from the article. Show all of your ideas by marking and highlighting your paper, and then turn in your article and topic sentence to me when you are done."

Assessment: I will review each student's topic sentence and the marking that made on their article. When reviewing their work, I will use the summarization checklist to make sure that they are applying the summarization rules to their understanding of creating a topic sentence.

References:

The Hot and Cold of Butterfly Dancing

            http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/feb/01/2

Hummingbirds

            http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/01/hummingbirds/klesius-text

Holcomb, Joanna. Summing up the Suds

            http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/doorways/holcombrl.htm

Garrison, Linzie. Reading is a Flower Bed…Dig for the Main Idea

            http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/awakenings/garrisonlrl.htm

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