Miss Amber's Literary Lesson Designs

Rationale: The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension, and students at this level are ready to take on this challenging goal. This lesson introduces students to a helpful strategy known as summarization, which will help them read to learn and understand. Students will learn to delete trivial and repeated information in an article about the Tiger.

 

Materials:

• Class set of the article “Tiger” by National Geographic Kids

• Rules of summarization to show over projector

• Assessment chart for each student (for teacher use)

• Colored marker for each student

• White paper

• Student journals

• Projector

 

Procedures:

1. Teacher says: Who has ever read an article or a book, and told a friend or parent about what they read? Do you read them the whole book, story, or article, or do you just tell them the important parts of what you read? Raise your hand if you simply tell them the important parts? If your hand is raised, then you’ve already practiced what we are working on today! This is called summarization and it happens by giving a summary of the important parts of a book or article. Summarization is a helpful strategy good readers use to help comprehend or understand what you are reading. If you can summarize a book or article, it is a good indication that you are able to understand what you’ve read. Let’s look more in depth at what summarization really looks like!

2. Before we begin to practice summarization, let's review what we might already know about tigers from our prior knowledge.  Raise your hand if you know a fact about tigers! (call on student) Right! Tigers are big cats.  Someone else give me another fact! (call on another student) yes! Tigers are predators. One more before moving on… (call on final student) you’re right! Tigers do live in Asia. Boy, you guys sure have good background knowledge from our science lesson last week on tigers!

3. You all are doing so great! Keep it up! Now, let's talk more about summarization. Everybody take out a marker and I am going to pass out white paper! Turn your paper horizontal, like a hot dog, and divide it into three different columns. Okay, now let's look at our "Rules of Summarizing" up on the board. (put rules of summarization on board using projector) Who can read me what the first rule of summarizing is? (Call on student). Yes, the first rule of summarizing is to delete the trivia, or unimportant information. We don’t want to keep any repeated information. First, write this rule at the top of the first column on your piece of paper. It can be very helpful to cross out important information if possible. This will help you to better understand the main message the author is trying to tell you. Let's look at the second rule. The second rule is to find the important information. Now, write this rule at the top of the second column. When you find something that is important in the book or article you are reading, underline or highlight the sentence. This is so you can easily go back and see what’s important! The final rule of summarization is to make a topic sentence. Lastly, write this rule at the top of the third column on your paper. Writing a topic sentence can be tricky because you have to fit the important information into one little sentence! I know you guys can do it!

4. Teacher says: Now we are going to practice summarizing with an article called "Tiger". Has anyone ever seen a tiger in real life? They are not native to Alabama so you must go to a zoo to see one! They are big animals, that’s for sure. According to this article, they are not only interesting in their size, but in their life style too! Let's read more to find out why they are so interesting! Let's look at the first paragraph and part of the second paragraph of the article together: “Easily recognized by its coat of reddish-orange with dark stripes, the tiger is the largest wild cat in the world. The big cat's tail is 3 feet (1 meter) long. The powerful predator generally hunts alone, able to bring down prey such as deer and antelope. Tigers wait until dark to hunt. The tiger sprints to an unsuspecting animal, usually pulling it off its feet with its teeth and claws. If the prey animal is large, the tiger bites its throat to kill it; smaller prey is usually killed when the tiger breaks its neck.”

5. Before we start to summarize this paragraph let’s go over some vocabulary.  What does coat mean?  That’s right!  It means it’s fur or hair. Now that we’ve gone over some vocabulary, let’s get started! Follow along as I use my rules to summarize this paragraph. (Pull out a pre-made copy of the 3 columns on paper). Let's look at the first sentence: “Easily recognized by its coat of reddish-orange with dark stripes, the tiger is the largest wild cat in the world.” How can we know that tigers are the largest wild cat in the world? I think we should read the next sentence before making that decision. It says, “The big cat's tail is 3 feet (1 meter) long.” I’d say this is definitely important because it is telling us about how long a tiger’s tail is, so it’s body must be pretty big too. I am going to write sentence number one and two under my second column of important information.  The first sentence of the second paragraph says, “The powerful predator generally hunts alone, able to bring down prey such as deer and antelope.” It says they hunt alone and are very strong and I would say that’s pretty important in knowing how tigers get their food! We should put this sentence in the second column as well! The next sentence says, “Tigers wait until dark to hunt.” This is important because no we know that tigers hunt at night, so they must sleep during the day. We can add this to the second column. To summarize we cannot name all of the specifics all the time, or we would have too much information. Now the last two sentences say, “The tiger sprints to an unsuspecting animal, usually pulling it off its feet with its teeth and claws. If the prey animal is large, the tiger bites its throat to kill it; smaller prey is usually killed when the tiger breaks its neck.” This tells us how the tiger catches its prey, so we can add this to the second column.

6. Now that we have finished reading and picking apart the first paragraph let's try and see if we can come up with a topic sentence. Remember, a topic sentence is one sentence that explains what the whole paragraph is talking about. I am going to look at the parts I have in column 2. Remember, column two is the important info I wrote down! Look at your second column to see what important information that we wrote down. I have that “the big cat’s tail is 3 feet long, they hunt alone and are very powerful, and they catch their prey with their teeth and bite their necks!"  I would make this a topic sentence by saying: “Because tigers are big and hunt at night, they are very powerful creatures.”  Now I have all my important information in one sentence, and this is a summary of the paragraph I was reading. Does anybody have any questions?

7. Now, I am going to let you summarize each of the remaining paragraphs on your own. Make sure to use your paper with the columns to help you filter through the paragraphs. You can also look at the rules of summarization up on the board if you need any help. Come up with one topic sentence for each paragraph. When you are finished, I want you to staple the article to your paper with your columns, and turn it in to me.

8. Assessment: I will review each student's column chart to determine if they could successfully summarize the different paragraphs. I will use the assessment checklist to record each child's grade. Topic sentences may vary but I will look to ensure the same general information was included. They will check comprehension by verbally answering the comprehension questions below as a group.

 

Comprehension Questions:

1. How many pounds of meat are tigers known to eat in one night?

2. Do tigers enjoy the water?

3. Why are tigers endangered?

 

Assessment Checklist:

Student Name: ___________________________

1. Did the student fill out the chart on his/her paper?

2. Did the students come up with topic sentences for the remaining paragraphs?

3. Did the student successfully delete unimportant/redundant information?

4. Did the student successfully identify important parts?

5. Did the student use the important information to come up with topic sentence?

 

References:

 

Adapted from: “Slothing into Summerization” by Ellen Ormond

http://ekormond.wixsite.com/art-director-portfol/reading-to-learn

 

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/tiger/#photoark-tiger.png