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Reading to Learn 

Eating through Summarization

Rationale: In this lesson we will work on teaching students on reading to learn. Students will need to able to comprehend the texts when learning to read and be able to summarize. To get to the overall lesson, students will learn to summarize by highlighting key facts, vocab words, and crossing out unnecessary information, then be able to summarize the passage when asked about it. We will test this lesson with an article that the students will read and break down to find the summary. 

 

Materials:

  • Pencil (each student)

  • Paper to write summary (each student)

  • Article for each student to have and be able to write on (link below)

  • Highlighter (each student)

  • Expo marker 

  • White board

  • Rubric for teacher to check each student’s project

 

Procedures: 

  1. explain to the class: We will first learn the importance of summarizing. Does anybody want to guess what summarizing means when we are talking about reading? After a few guesses, explain it them. Summarizing is when you read an article, watch something, listen to somebody tell a story, and then try to remember the key points of the story instead of trying to remember every part of the story. When we read an article, if I asked you about it would you be able to remember everything that was said? No! but you could probably tell me the main idea and help me to understand the key points of the article, right? So, we are going to work on our reading comprehension and summarizing skills! 

  2. First we are going to break down summarizing down to figure out what we can do to best understand the story. There is three important things to do when we summarize. [write on the board:  cancelled, important, topic]. Let’s break down each one of these points. 

 3. Cancelled: this is the information in the text that is not important to the story. The extra “fluff” that is there to reemphasize a part of the story. Like when you are eating a hamburger, you don’t have to have the ketchup to make it yummy, but it makes it taste better. The cancelled information in an article is not needed, but makes it sound better. So we are first going to cross out the information that is not helpful to find the main idea. [put a line through the word cancelled on the board. Ex: cancelled information ]  

 

         Important: this is the stuff in the article that makes the article meaty. Like when you are eating a hamburger, the best part is the meat, not the bun! So we have to search for the parts of the story that makes it delicious. When we find these parts of the story, we want to highlight them so we know we can look back at the highlighted parts to make our completed main idea. 

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4. Topic: the topic of the article is the main idea. We want to find all the parts that make up the meaty middle of the hamburger and figure out the summary. To do this we need to look at all our highlighted parts that were important and form a sentence that wraps up all the information into a small piece of information. 

 

5. Book-talk: Speaking of food, who here has ever wondered about bananas? The way they look or the way they taste? Or even where they come from? (wait for hands to rise) well today we are going to find out all the bits and pieces you ever needed to know about bananas.             

6. Before you read say: We are first going to review some words that will be vocabulary words for this article. If you do not understand vocabulary words in the article, it makes the text harder to understand. [write the words chromosome, control group, clone]. Does anybody know what these words mean? Provide sample questions using the word, and scaffolding by making a sentence for the student to understand it in a complete sentence. 

Say: these words on the board are words that come up in the article we are about to read. The word chromosome means structure inside of the nucleus of a cell and it holds the DNA. Did you know that bananas have chromosomes too?

  1. 7. Modeling: [pass out article to each student] have everybody look at the first paragraph and read it aloud as a class. [have everybody get out a pencil and highlighter]. I am going to show you how to summarize the first paragraph.

    1. First: cross out unnecessary information that is not essential 

    2. Second: highlight the important information that is important information 

    3. Form a topic sentence from information you have highlighted

So the first paragraph says:

            Have you ever wondered why all bananas look and taste the same? It’s because almost every banana we eat, which is the Cavendish variety, is genetically the same – they are all clones of one single banana (Figure 1). The banana fruits are also all sterile, so they can only grow as clones, not reproduce naturally. This genetic uniformity is quite dangerous – if one banana is susceptible to a disease, they all are and it can spread really quickly. It’s a familiar scenario: in the 1950s the bananas in the stores were not Cavendish but Gros Michel. A different fungal disease wiped these bananas out so farmers had to turn to the Cavendish variety which were resistant to that disease, but now again are on the verge of collapse. 

So to review the first paragraph, we can look at the parts we have highlighted to see what was the important key parts of this paragraph. Bananas are Cavendish variety, all bananas are a clone of a single one, they are sterile, if one is susceptible to disease, they all can be. Now, how could we make a topic sentence for this paragraph? [allow for a few students to answer]. 

One way to summarize this paragraph would be to say: Bananas are a sort of Cavendish variety that are always a clone of another, this is why they have to be sterile or could be susceptible to spreading disease. 

 

8. Student summarize: 

Say: now we are going to use the three techniques we learned today and work through the rest of the article. Make sure you cross out unhelpful information, highlight the important details, and started thinking about your topic sentence as you work through the information. 

 

9. Students write their own topic sentence: [pass out a piece of paper and have everybody write down their topic sentence from the rest of the article]. Go back and reread the parts you highlighted, write them down on your paper, and then at the bottom write your topic sentence.

  1. Assessment: when you finish your summaries, bring them to my desk and I will hand you the mini quiz to help you and me detect what you have learned from the article. (collect all the summaries of the article, evaluate the summarization using the following check boxes)

    1. Ignored the fluff 

    2. Reduced the text into one to two sentences

    3. Brought ideas together from the entire article

    4. Highlighted information is not whole sentences

    5. Not too wordy

  2. Quiz:

    1. What are the two major fungal diseases that can affect bananas?

    2. Why are bananas Cavendish?

    3. What do we do when we use a control group of bananas?

    4. What is the problem with banana sterility?

      • Answers: A. BLSD and Pseudocercospora fijiensis. B. developed in tropical forest. C. use banana leaves from another plantation. D. they do not have any genetic diversity and do not adapt to different conditions. 

 

Resources:

Article: https://sciencejournalforkids.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Fungus_Genome_article.pdf

 

Emma webb lesson plan: https://www.amazon.com/Cedric-Shark-Gets-Toothache-Pre-school-ebook/dp/B00CJT0G2C

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