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 Sloth.

 

Materials:

• Class set of the article "Sloth " 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 sloths from our prior knowledge.  Raise your hand if you know a fact about sloths! (call on student) Right! Sloths are pretty slow animals.  Someone else give me another fact! (call on another student) yes! Sloths live in trees. One more before moving on… (call on final student) you’re right! Sloths eat mostly plants and fruits! Boy, you guys sure have good background knowledge from our science lesson last week on sloths!

 

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 though!

 

 4.     Teacher says: Now we are going to practice summarizing with an article called "Sloth". Has anyone ever seen a sloth in real life? They are not native to Alabama so you must go to a zoo to see one! They are interesting looking animals, that’s for sure. According to this article, they are not only interesting in their looks, 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 of the article together:

“It's a good thing sloths don't have to go to school. They'd never make it on time. These drowsy tree-dwellers sleep up to 20 hours a day! And even when they are awake, they barely move at all. In fact, they're so incredibly sluggish, algae actually grows on their fur."

 

 5.     Before we start to summarize this paragraph let’s go over some vocabulary.  What does drowsy mean?  That’s right!  It means to be sleepy.  What is a dweller? Yes! It’s something that lives somewhere permanently. What is algae? Right! It’s a type of green plant that grows in damp places. Now that we’ve gone over some vocabulary, lets 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: “It’s a good thing sloths don’t have to go to school.” Do we think it is important that sloths wouldn’t been good at going to school? I think we should read the next sentence before making that decision. It says, “They’d never make it on time.” I’d say this is definitely important because it is telling us about how sloths are so slow. I am going to write sentence number one and two under my second column of important information.  The third sentences says, “These drowsy tree-dwellers sleep up to 20 hours a day!” It says they are tree-dwellers and id say that’s pretty important in knowning where sloths live! We should put this sentence in the second column as well!  However, I do not think the next part is super important.  The fourth sentence says, “And even when they are awake, they barely move at all.” This is unimportant because we already know that sloths are slow, it was mentioned above. So, this is redundant information. Something that’s slow barely moves and that obvious! We can mark through this information. To summarize we cannot name all of the specifics all the time, or we would have too much information. Now the last sentence says, “In fact, they're so incredibly sluggish, algae actually grows on their fur." This is important because it lets us know that sloths probably live in a place that’s wet, like the rainforest!

 

 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  “sloths would never make it to school on time, they are lazy tree-dwellers and they have algae in their fur!"  I would make this a topic sentence by saying: “Because sloths are so slow and dwell in trees, they have algae growing in their fur.”  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. Where do the sloths dwell and what animal do they resemble?

2. How many types of sloths are there?

3. What benefits does the algae on the sloths fur have?

 

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:

 

National Geographic Kids, "Sloth”

 

Going Nuts for Summarization – Margaret Anne Logan

 

Sloth Image