Ms. Daugherty's Literacy Lesson Designs
Reading to Learn
Building our Summarization Skills like the Colonies
A Lesson on Teaching Vocabulary
Michaela Daugherty
Rationale: The goal of reading is to fully comprehend what you just read. Once they have learned fluency and accuracy, then they are ready for this challenging goal. This lesson introduces the strategy of summarization, which will help them read to learn. Students will learn how to delete trivial facts and focus more on the important facts in the text.
Materials: 1. Expository text "A Picture Book about George Washington"
2. Class poster of the summarization rules and a marker
3. Making Sight Words, Pages 232-233
4.. Projector
5. Article “ 13 Colonies Coming to America Part 1”
Procedure: 1. “Who has ever read a really good book and wanted to tell a friend? Do you remember every little detail or only the important facts? Only the important part! This is called summarization. Summarization is a helpful tool good readers use to understand what they just read. If you can summarize a book then that is a good sign you are understanding the text!”
2. “First, we have to review some facts about George Washington we learned last week. What was George Washington’s first job as a little boy? That’s right a surveyor! What was his job for America? That’s right the First President! What does the term colony mean? Correct, it means a settlement that is still under rule of another counrty. Our example of using it in a sentence could be; Jamestown was a colony of England. How many colonies were in the New World? Who can give me a sentence using our vocabulary word colony? Yes, thank you!"
3. As the teacher goes over the rules write them down on the poster paper. “Now, before we can summarize we need to make some summarization rules. The first rule is to delete trivia, or the unimportant information. The second rule is to "superordinate" facts and events. Superordinate means to put small importanat facts under a big umbrella topic of a bigger event. The third rule is to find important information. When you find something that you think is important information underline or highlight the sentence so you can go back and read it to remember it. The last rule is to make a topic sentence. Making a topic sentence can be difficult but it combines all the important information into one sentence that you can share with others.
4. “Now we are going to practice summarization together” Then the teacher will read the expository text A Picture Book of George Washington and model how to summarize. The teacher will put the page on the projector so that the students can read along with her. "George Washington was a very influential man in the early days of the United States of America. It all started when he was a little boy and learned how to survey. I wonder what he did next to build up out country to where it is today? Let’s read to find out. Now, let’s go back to our rules and start a summary. First, let’s delete some trivial details. The sentence ‘Young George like to fish and go boating’ an important sentence? No, that’s right so we can delete it. Now, let’s look an important sentence. How about this sentence ‘In 1783, when the American Colonies won the war, George Washington was hero’? That’s right! It is a very important sentence. Now, for our final rule let’s come up with a topic sentence. Anyone have any good ideas? How about ‘George Washington played an important role in establishing America’. Very good class!
5. Pass out copies of the Article “Coming to America Part 1” “Now I want you to read this article and think about these questions when you are reading
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How would you picture the first settlement of Jamestown?
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What were the first 13 colonies?
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What motivated the colonist to move to the new Americas?
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What did being a colony mean to the colonist of the new America?
6. In the next activity, the students will summarize the article based on the class Summarization Rules and share with a partner.
Assessments: Students will be assessed by their summary based on a rubric.
Resources:
Adler, David A., John Wallner, and Alexandra Wallner. A Picture Book of George Washington. New York: Holiday House, 1989. Print.
Murray, Bruce A. Making Sight Words: Teaching Word Recognition from Phoneme Awareness to Fluency: How to Help Children Read Words Effortlessly without Memorization. Ronkonkoma, NY: Linus Publications, 2012. Print.
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