Reading to Learn

Summarizing in the Sea

Reading to Learn

Rationale:

The main goal of this lesson is to teach children how to learn while reading. This is done with summarization. An affect way to teach children how to summarize is through the about-point method. IN this method children ask themselves two important questions: 1. What is the text about? (Which shows them the main idea of the text) and 2. What is the main point the writer is trying to make about this topic? (This allows the children to figure out what the important parts of the passage are. Summarizing should only point out the important parts so the about-point method will allow the children to summarize the texts themselves by pointing out the key parts of the article. This will give them a deeper understanding of the article.

Materials:

-Pencil and paper for each child

-A copy of the shark article for each child

-Shark Quiz

-Summarization Checklist

Procedures:

Has anyone ever had a super fun day hanging out with your friend and then whenever you get back with your family they ask you what all you did that day?! You can’t tell everyyyyyy specific thing that happened that day or it would take hours. Instead, you just tell the most fun parts of the day! Whenever you do that you are doing what is called summarizing. People can summarize many different things whether it be a story about yourself or the important parts of a book you read. We already all know how to summarize when it comes to how fun our day was but today we are going to be learning how to summarize the important parts of a story or article.
One way that can help us to summarize a story or article is the about-point strategy. You will ask yourself two questions for this strategy. The first question is What is this text about? which should be pretty easy! The next question is a bit tricker and that is What is the main point the writer is making about that topic?. So once you know what the text is about you have to figure out what the important parts of the story are that the writer is trying to teach us just like if you were telling the main important parts of your day. To help us answer the second question will think of an umbrella term or a category that we can put all of the important parts of the text into.
Today we are going to be using the about-point strategy to learn more about sharks! Can anyone tell me what all you know about sharks?*listen and engage* Yes! And lots of people are scared of sharks but they actually like humans and are really cool which we will get to learn more about today!
Now we are going to talk about a word that many of you might not know. That word is resistance. Resistance is when there is something that would normally slow you down or make things more difficult but because you have resistance it doesn’t change anything for you. Which of these sentences uses resistance right? 1. The egg has resistance when it was on the hot pan. 2. The forcefield had resistance when electricity tried to hit it. 3. The sock had resistance when it was put in water. Yes, it is the second one because the forcefield was not changed or affected when the superpowers tried to hit it! Now y’all try to finish this sentence Superman has resistance when ____ is near. *Have students answer*
Now let’s look at it in this shark article. A shark’s skin is made of tiny scales which point towards to tail. What this means is there is no resistance while they’re swimming in the water so it doesn’t slow them down. See it is not hard for the shark to swim fast because they have no resistance when they are trying to swim. The main topic of this is sharks. What are they trying to say about the sharks? They are discussing the sharks have skin that helps them to swim easily!
Now I want to have y’all look at an article and decide what it is about and then what the main point is. Did you know that not all sharks live in the sea? Well some of them live in rivers, like the Bull Shark, the Spear Tooth Shark, and the River Shark. Amazingly they can survive in the river and seawater. The Bull Shark actually changes things in its blood to survive in both. That’s amazing, wonder how he does that! What is the main topic? Yes, it is about sharks. What are they saying about sharks? They are saying how sharks can survive in the river, sea, or both!
Now I will be handing out a whole article about sharks and y’all will summarize the main points. You will make a topic sentence for each section using the about-point method. This will help you to learn lots about sharks! The point of summarizing is to get all of the main points and put them together so that we can have a paragraph that only shows what is important. When we are finished you will all take a quiz to show what you learned about sharks. *pass out article and ask them to read and summarize. Pass out quiz after*