READING FLUENTLY WITH MS. FIELDS

Rationale

Reading is the initial step for students to learn new information. While reading, it is crucial for them to differentiate between significant and insignificant information. In this lesson I will teach students how to summarize. Summarizing is a skill that all beginning readers need to practice in order to be successful in reading comprehension. Readers need to learn to summarize so they can successfully find the important details of a text and remember the important information. This lesson is going to teach students the steps they can take in order to master summarizing large passages they read so that they can detect the important information. The teacher will then model how to summarize an article read aloud to the class. To conclude, the students will practice summarizing the new article independently and be evaluated.

 

Materials

Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard Published by National Geographic Kids

Smartboard copy of article

Handouts of article (1 per child)

Summary checklist (1 for each student)

Assessment checklist (for teacher – 1 for each student)

 

Summary Checklist

Did I…

_____ write my topic sentence?

_____ find supporting details to help answer the question?

_____ remove unimportant information by crossing it out?

_____ remove repeated ideas?

_____ create a 3-5 sentence summary?

 

Assessment Checklist

When summarizing, did the student…                  YES       NO

Delete unimportant information?

Delete repeated information?

Organize items with a big idea?

Select a topic?

Write an inclusive, simple topic sentence to summarize the passage?

 

 

Procedures

1. Say: In today's lesson, we are going to be working on summarization. Can anyone tell me what summarization is? (Wait for answers) Summarizing is selecting the most important parts of a text. By doing this, you can find the most useful information without getting confused by things you do not need to know. It is super useful when reading a long book or article that is explaining something.

 

2. Say: Before we begin reading, I want to talk about some words that we will encounter in the text that we might not know. These words are: orphan and endangered. The first word is orphan. To be an orphan means that the parents are gone, passed away, and the animal is alone with no one to raise it. If a snow leopard is called an orphan, what does this mean? (Answer: Its parents are not alive, it has no one to raise it.) The second word is endangered. Endangered means a species of animal is at risk of dying out, or becoming fewer in number and disappearing. For example, cheetahs are endangered. What does this mean? (Answer: becoming fewer in number, close to being no more cheetahs on earth.)

 

3. Say: When we want to summarize a passage, we read a little bit at a time. When we finish reading that small part we look back and figure out the most important parts. We cross out information that does not add value to the main idea. We must be very selective in choosing the important information.

 

4. Say: Now that we know what summarization is and why it is important, I am going to model how to do it. To do this, I will use an article titled, Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard. Do you think a baby snow leopard could survive without its parents? Now we are going to read the article to find out the answer. Watch how I can summarize the first two paragraphs in the article.  (Open Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard on the SmartBoard OR have handouts for each student.) Remember I only want the important parts of the paragraph. First I am going to read the entire first and second paragraph.

 

In 2005, a passing herder noticed a tiny snow leopard cub, helpless and alone on the mountainside. The cub's mother was gone, likely killed by a hunter in the steep mountains of Pakistan.

The man decided to take the orphan home and raise it. But after a week, the herder realized the snow leopard baby wasn't healthy and that he didn't know how to feed it. The World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) heard about the cub and sent a staffer to the herder’s remote village. The situation was more urgent than just one animal in danger; snow leopards are an endangered species.

 

These paragraphs give us some great information. What I am going to do is underline the important parts. We want to figure out what this article is about. Let's see. The first paragraph says that a herder noticed a snow leopard that was alone, and the cub’s mother was most likely killed. I'm going to underline "A passing herder noticed a tiny snow leopard cub, helpless and alone on the mountainside" because the whole article is about the snow leopard. Then I am going to cross out the rest of the paragraph because it doesn't have any important information. In the next paragraph, I am going to underline 'The man decided to take the orphan home and raise it' because this is important information. I will cross out the next two sentences, and underline 'The situation was more urgent than just one animal in danger; snow leopards are an endangered species' because that is important information we need to know.

 

At the end, it looks like this:

In 2005, a passing herder noticed a tiny snow leopard cub, helpless and alone on the mountainside. The cub’s mother was gone, likely killed by a hunter in the steep mountains of Pakistan.

The man decided to take the orphan home and raise it. But after a week, the herder realized the snow leopard baby wasn't healthy and that he didn't know how to feed it. The World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) heard about the cub and sent a staffer to the herder’s remote village. The situation was more urgent than just one animal in danger; snow leopards are an endangered species.

 

5. Say: Now that we have a pretty good idea of how to summarize, let's try to summarize the next paragraph together.

 

In addition to being hunted for their beautiful, thick coats, the wild cats have lost much of their natural prey, such as wild mountain goats and sheep, to hunters. That has forced the normally reclusive cats to hunt livestock, which can get them shot by angry herders. The world population of snow leopards in their natural range—high mountains in Central Asia—has dropped to between 3,500 and 7,500. In Pakistan only about 200 to 420 are left. The people at the WWF-P didn't want to lose another.

 

What is the most important part of this passage? Let's underline the most important parts. Do you think what livestock the snow leopard eats is important? (Allow for students to voice their ideas.) No, I don't think so, either. (Encourage students to discuss what they believe are important points.)

 

End result:

In addition to being hunted for their beautiful, thick coats, the wild cats have lost much of their natural prey, such as wild mountain goats and sheep, to hunters. That has forced the normally reclusive cats to hunt livestock, which can get them shot by angry herders. The world population of snow leopards in their natural range—high mountains in Central Asia—has dropped to between 3,500 and 7,500. In Pakistan only about 200 to 420 are left. The people at the WWF-P didn't want to lose another.

 

6. Say: Now you are going to continue working on summarizing. I want you to read the rest of this article and underline the important points. Once you have finished, please come to the front to get a Summary Checklist. This will help you write a summary of the article using the underlined information. Do not worry if it looks short. The point of a summary is that it is a short description of an article. Once you have finished, turn to your neighbor to share your summary. See if there are any differences between your summaries and discuss them.

 

7.  Call on individual students to come to the desk and answer a few comprehension questions about the text. Ask: What happened to the snow leopard cub’s mother? What did the man do with the orphan snow leopard? Why did they choose to send the cub to a national park instead of releasing it back into the wild? What zoo did they take Leo to after he outgrew the national park? What happened after Leo got to the Bronx zoo?

Take up their summaries and use the assessment checklist to assess the summaries.

 

References

Grace Langhout, Super Fun Summarization.

http://www.auburn.edu/~gel0001/langhoutrl.htm

“Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard.” National Geographic Kids. National Geographic,n.d. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/nature/snow-leopard-rescue/

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