Reading to Learn | jaima-griffith

"Pulling it All Together"

Reading to Learn

Jaima Griffith

Rationale: After learning to read correctly and fluently, students must proceed to the next step, which is learning to read comprehensively in order to get the message of a text. In other words, children must learn to read to learn. Reading is the initial step for students to learn new information. While reading, it is crucial for them to differentiate between significant and insignificant information. In this lesson I will teach students how to summarize. Summarizing is a skill that all beginning readers need to practice in order to be successful in reading comprehension.

This lesson is going to teach students the steps they can take in order to master summarizing large passages they read so that they can detect the important information. The teacher will then model how to summarize an article read aloud to the class. We will go over it all together. To conclude, the students will practice summarizing the new article independently and be evaluated by how well they summarize and comprehend the article.

Materials:

1. Pencils and Paper for the students

2. “Slow Down for Calvin the Right Whale!” articles for students

3. “Play it Safe, Go For the Gear” articles for students

4. White board to write the rules for summarizing

5. Summary checklist and questions

6. Summary assessment rubric for evaluation

7. Vocabulary Words: manufacture, master, mature, and meadow

8. Summary Worksheet

Procedures:

1. Say: “Today we are going to learn a new reading strategy called summarization. This is a very important strategy to learn because it helps you comprehend when you read a story. Doing this will make us very good readers! Can anyone tell me what summarize means? (Wait for the correct response). That’s right! Summarizing is making longer stories shorter and picking out the important parts of the story and getting rid of the parts that are not important.” The teacher will give the students an example of an apple tree with “MAIN IDEA” written at the top and different branches towards the bottom that labeled “DETAILS.” This will be a great example for the students to visually get the idea of getting the details narrowed down to the most important parts, which will make up the main idea in the story. This will also show the students how all the details and the main idea is connected. Teacher will say, “In order to summarize, we first need to understand the many rules that go into making summarization important. The rules are: cross out the unimportant details, reduce parts of the text into fewer words, and choose a topic sentence.”

2. Say: “Now we are going to read an article and try to pick out the main ideas since we know the different rules that go into summarization. If you forget the rules, refer to the board when you forget or try to summarize. Remember, whenever you summarize, be sure to put them into your own words so that you are not taking someone else’s thoughts. Before we get started, we will review our vocabulary word.” Vocabulary list: manufacture, master, mature, and meadow. To review the vocabulary, I will do the following for each word: explain what it means using a student-friendly definition, model how to use it in a sentence, provide sample questions for using the word, and scaffold the students in making a sentence with the word. Example: “Our first word is ‘manufacture.’ Manufacture means to make something on a large scale using machinery. An example is, ‘The Honda car plant manufactures all different types of Honda cars.’ Now you can have a chance to make a sentence using the word. (let the students answer)

If the Coke plants manufactures Coke, what does the Pepsi plant manufacture? Who is the master in your household? How mature are you? Is a meadow full of trees?

3. Pass out a copy of the article, "Slow Down for Calvin the Right Whale!" to each student.

Does anyone know about saving whales? Does anyone know how much danger whales face? Well we are going to read a story about a whale who was in danger and how his little story inspired many people to help protect whales.

Once the students learned a bit about right whales and their problems, the next phase of producing a product that could educate others began. The students decided to produce a PowerPoint Presentation. The presentation included right whale anatomy and physiology, their habitats and their main threats; shipstrikes and entanglements. At this point each student took a different part to research and produce a few slides. I arranged for each student to have a scientist mentor from the Right Whale Consortium to correspond with so that the Presentation would be accurate. Finally each student’s slides were woven together into and informational PowerPoint. The theme of the PowerPoint was Calvin, the right whale’s life so far. Early in the research the students found out that in 1992 a baby right whale was orphaned in the Bay of Fundy because her mother was hit by a ship and killed. The scientists at the time called the baby Calvin because she was a feisty little one and managed to survive without her mother. Calvin was entangled in the late nineties but managed to get free with help from a disentanglement team. Calvin also gave birth to her first calf in 2004. Her life story (the life that began the same year the students’ lives did) would be the thread to hold the story of all right whales together. The students even had a four-page print out of all the times Calvin had been sighted by scientists…..

4. Teacher will say: "We are going to read this article together as a class and practice the skills we have discussed to come up with a good summary together".

5. Teacher will read the article aloud to the class as they follow along with their own copy.

6. Teacher will model how to summarize the article to the students to start with and remind them of the rules used in summarization. Say: “In 1992, the mother of a North Atlantic right whale was hit and killed by a ship in Canada’s Bay of Fundy. Researchers studying these whales named the 8th month old baby Calvin because they knew that in order for it to survive, it would need to be feisty.

7. Teacher will say: "Now we need to summarize the article. How do we begin? (Allow wait time for students to suggest how to begin summarization) Right, let's pick out important details and mark out unimportant details as we read the article again. To do this, we need to think about the subject that seems to be mentioned more than one time. As I read the first few sentences, I see that a North Atlantic right whale named Calvin is mentioned repeatedly and is very important to this article. A proposed law to protect the whales is also mentioned repeatedly. I think that the law seems to be the main idea of this article. My first sentence of the summary will be "An 8-month-old North Atlantic right whale named Calvin was orphaned after her mother was hit by a ship."

8. Teacher will continue saying: "Picking out these main ideas is very important to figure out at the beginning of the summarizing process. After we do this, we have to decide what the author is trying to say about the topic. Let's look again at the first paragraph and I’ll model what I do when I am summarizing. Now I am going to write, “A rule was proposed to make ships slow down in areas where right whales swim". That is a key point in what the author's message that is about the whales and why this rule was proposed.”

9. Continue to go through the steps of summarizing this article about Calvin and the proposed law. The teacher will continue thinking aloud so that students can hear how to decide what information about the article is important and what is unnecessary information that can be marked out. Mark out useless information, such as information that is repetitive in the article or that describes a topic, and underline important information. The students will now respond to the following reading comprehension questions: Why did they name him Calvin? Why can the whales not get out of the way of ships in time? What would have to change for the whales to be able to move in time?

10. Teacher will pass out "Play it Safe: Go for the Gear" article. Students will read the article and practice the steps of summarizing. They will be given a good amount of time to read the article. Once they have read the article they will be instructed to write a summary based on their reading just like the teacher modeled in class. Each student will receive a checklist to remind them what to look for when summarizing.

Assessment:

Summary Checklist

Did I…

_____ Write my topic sentence of the article?

_____ Find supporting details to help answer the question?

_____ Remove unimportant information by crossing it out?

_____ Remove repeated ideas?

_____ Create a 3-5 sentence summary of the text I just read?

Play it Safe: Go for the Gear comprehension questions

How are helmets becoming lighter and easier to wear?

What were the first helmets made of in the 1900s?

What kinds of polymers are there and how are they used?