Summarization Station

Reading to Learn Lesson Design by Mallie Stone

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. This lesson is centered on teaching students how to summarize by eliminating trivial information that is consistently repeated, leaving only the most important facts.

Materials:

Pencils
Paper
Highlighters
White board
Dry erase markers
Rubric for grading summaries
Overhead camera
Galapagos Island Giant Tortoises Saved From Near Extinction article

Procedures:

Today, we are going to be learning how to summarize an article! This is when you condense the information down to only what is most important by deleting the trivial and repeated information. We are going to practice how to do this skill with two different articles. We will focus on what the main idea is, what facts support the main idea, and what information we can remove.
Now when I pass around this stack of paper, get one sheet. Watch me as I show you how we’re going to fold the paper in a trifold. First, take the paper and fold it over 1/3 of the page. Then with the remaining part of the paper, fold it behind the two parts. Your paper should be split into three sections: a title page, two middle pages, and a back page. Now you try, and I’ll come around and help you if you need.
Now that everyone has folded their paper, let’s go over why we folded our papers like this. We’ll be using it as a study card of the steps for making a summary, and you can use this whenever you need help summarizing articles. The 1st step in summarization is picking out the most important details and underlining or highlighting them. The 2nd step is finding the repeated details that are unimportant and crossing them out. The 3rd and final step is organizing the information you found in step one. The main idea should be supported by the details. Now, write these steps on a page in your study card. [Ask students to recall the steps to you as you have them write the steps in their cards.] The last page of your study card will be for information that you need to remember about summarizing. For instance, summaries should always be shorter in length than the information you are summarizing.
I’m going to pass out an article now, which is Galapagos Island Giant Tortoises Saved From Near Extinction. We’re going to popcorn read the first two paragraphs as a class. [Once student finishes reading paragraph two, stop them.] Okay, so let’s practice summarizing using the first sentence in the second paragraph [display on overhead camera]:

According to a new study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE on October 28th by James Gibbs, a biology professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, the island is now home to over 1,500 of the giants.
First, we want to look for the main idea in this sentence. Usually the main idea is relevant to the title of the article or mentioned a lot throughout the article. [Ask what students think is the main point.] Great job! The message that this sentence is trying to get across is [Española Island] is home to over 1,500 [giant tortoises], so highlight that last part. While all of the other information is important for reference purposes, it’s not relevant to us right now for summarizing purposes, so we can cross that out. Your sentence should look like this now, but the remaining part of your sentence should be crossed out [display on overhead camera]:

[According to a new study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE on October 28th by James Gibbs, a biology professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry,] the island is now home to over 1,500 of the giants.
On your first page of your study card, summarize this main idea. The main idea of this information is that Española Island is home to giant tortoises. A supporting detail to this would be the number of tortoises it’s home to, which is 1,500.
Let’s continue to pick out important points in each paragraph of the article. I want you to go through and continue reading the article on your own. Summarize as much as you can, highlighting important parts and marking through unimportant details. I’ll come around and check your work.
Everyone’s study cards are looking great so far! Once you’ve read the whole article and gotten the main ideas and supporting details highlighted, I want you to jot down a one-paragraph brief summary on the article. At the bottom of your article, write five new vocabulary words you learned from the article and what they mean. Does anybody have any questions?

Assessment:

Students will be assessed at the end on how well they did on their summaries. I will use this scoring rubric to grade their summaries for the correct information:

In his/her summary, did the student...

Delete significant information? YES / NO
Write a topic sentence? YES / NO
Write 3-5 good, concise sentences? YES / NO
Select key information from the article? YES / NO
Choose the correct main topic for this article? YES / NO
List 5 new vocabulary words/definitions at the end? YES / NO

I will also ask the students a series of comprehension questions to see if they read and understood the article:

What island do 1,500 giant tortoises live on now? Española Island
Where did 100-year-old Lonesome George live before he died? Galapagos Island
How long can a giant tortoise survive without food or water? One year
What animal, which provided no benefit to the giant tortoises, was introduced to the island 50 years ago? Goats

Reference:

Galapagos Island Giant Tortoises Saved From Near Extinction – http://www.dogonews.com/2014/11/2/galapagos-island-giant-tortoises-saved-from-near-extinction

Summarizing Smarts! by Mallory Blankenship http://www.auburn.edu/%7Emeb0044/blankenshiprl.htm

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