Rationale: The important goal for reading instruction is the individual comprehension and understanding. When students need to understand the text, it is important for them to learn effective strategies in order to practice building comprehension, and read fluently. It is also important for students to be able to know when and where they can pull certain information from

the text. This means that students also need to learn how to reread about passage after reading it the first time. Summarization is a very effective, researched way to make sure that your students are able to do this correctly. It also teaches students how to delete useless information and how to keep the important information organized.

             Materials:

                   - Pencils

                   - Paper

                   - White board

                   -  Marker

                   - Bookmark with summarization rules.

                   - Copies of National Geographic Kids article about Sloths

             The Summarization steps:

                 1. Pick out important details and events that are very important to the story           

                 2. Delete the useless ideas and events from the passage.

                 3. Highlight the important details using key words.

                 4. Pick an important topic sentence

                 5. Come up with a topic sentence if none is present.

           Procedures: Start the lesson off with an introduction to the summarization rules. Say: “Boys and girls, today we will be learning about summarization and how to find information to use for it. Does anyone know what summarization means? Great job! Summarization is when you look an entire passage that you just read, and decide which information and events are important to consider from the story. I am now going to give everyone a piece of paper and a pencil.” (Give each student one sheet of paper and one pencil.) I am now going to right down the rules for summarization on the board. I want you to make sure that you have all of the rules written down as I write them on the board. Say: The first step is to delete all of the redundancies, which is information that is repetitive. The second step is to find the important facts of information and making a note of it. In easier words, pick out important items and events. The final step is to write a sentence that talks about everything the writer is said about and in the topic. Say: “The main idea is supported details. Next, write the steps on the piece of paper I gave you. [They can look at what I have written on the board] Then, at the bottom of the paper, the students will write down some key points to remember when summarizing a passage. For example, summaries should always be short in length compared to the information that you need to summarize.” Now that everyone has seen how to summarize a story, I will put everyone in groups and give each group a copy of the National Geographic kids article about sloths to try to read and summarize. If you need help, look at the five steps on your bookmark. We need all the necessary details to support our summarizations, so I want everyone to sit down and read carefully! When finished, have each group discuss with each other their choices for the details and main ideas. This will allow them to talk and think about their different ideas without me telling them what to do or how to do it. During this time I will quietly walk around the classroom, and monitor their progress.

            Assessment: At the end of this lesson, the students will be asked to write a paragraph summarizing the story. I would like for the students to use the steps we learned in our lesson, not just list them. I want everything they write to come to them easily and flowing through. I will regard the bookmarks as my checklist as I check everyone’s paragraphs to make they have used all of the steps. 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: Did the students’ paragraphs include: Begin by deleting useless information? Gather important items and events together? Find key topic? Find the main important information from the story? Write a topic sentence that talks everything that is an important idea or event from the passage? I will then ask each student a series of questions that make sure that they understood the story and the information and events they got from the story.

 Resources:

 Article, “Sloths”: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/sloth/#sloth-beach-upside-down.jpg

 Murray, B.A. (2012). Making Sight Words: Teaching Word Recognition from Phoneme Awareness to Fluency. Ronkonkoma NY

 Swimming into Summarization by Jordan Payne: http://jordanpayne95.wix.com/jordanslessondesigns#!reading-to-learn/ayvpd