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Do the Polar Bear Plunge with Summaries

Reading to Learn Lesson Design

Addie Herrlin

 

Rationale: Teaching children to read is necessary for many reasons, but perhaps one of the most important is comprehension. Knowing how to read is essential for people to make sense of the world around them, and understanding what words actually mean is important for this to happen. After students learn to read accurately and fluently, they can then move on to comprehension, or reading to learn. Summarization is a useful strategy that can be used for reading comprehension, and this lesson is meant to help teach students to read to learn by using summarization. Summarizing includes deleting trivial or unhelpful and unnecessary information to zone in on the parts of the text that have more meaning and importance.

 

Materials: “Polar Bears Listed as Threatened”-class set, including teacher; polar bear bookmark and blank bookmark for each student; overhead projector; pencil and lined paper for each student; class set of highlighters (one for each student); handout with the rules for summarization (1. Find important information. 2. Take out any unnecessary or redundant information. 3. Write out a sentence that can be used as a topic sentence.); Assessment chart, below; Comprehension questions as a handout: 1. What does threatened mean? Why are polar bears “threatened?” 2. What caused polar bears to become threatened? 3. Is there anything going on to try and stop polar bears from being threatened?

 

Procedures:

 

  • Say: “Class, today we’re going to learn about summarizing. Does anyone know what summarizing is? Right, summarizing means to find the most important information from the text and be able to retell it to another person. Summarizing is really important when we read. It can really help us understand what’s going on in the text, and you should all try to use it whenever you can. It’s important to remember that we don’t have to talk about every single detail in the text, just the really important things. Okay, so do we have to recite the text with every single detail when we summarize? No, we just remember the important details and main ideas. Today, we’re going to work on summarizing and I know you all can do it so we can become even better readers!”

 

2. Say: “Before we can work on our summarization skills, we have some vocabulary that we need to talk about. Does anyone remember what a habitat is? Can you tell the class? Good! So a habitat is an animal’s natural environment, or where he or she lives in the world. Last week we talked about dolphins. Who can tell me where a dolphin’s habitat is? Great, it’s in the ocean! What about a tiger? Good, in the jungle! A tiger’s natural habitat is in the jungle.

                 

      You all did a great job remember habitat. An example of this would be, "If we don't protect the rainforest, many animals would lose their natural habitat." Now, another word that’s important for us to know for this class is “threaten.” Does anyone know what threaten means? [Call on a few students to see what they know] Threaten means to endanger someone or something and to put them at risk for bad things. An example of this word in a sentence would be, "Before dinosaurs became extinct, they were threatened." Do you think that polar bears are threatened? Right, we'll read about them in our lesson today.  

     

      We have one more word that’s really important for our lesson today, vulnerable. Who can tell me what vulnerable means? Vulnerable means sensitive to attack or harm, either physical or emotional. Great job. Now that we’ve covered these new words, we can move on to summarizing. I want to see if you can finish a sentence with this word. [Call on students to assess whether they can use the word in a sentence."

 

3. Say: “Now we all know what summarizing is and have learned some new vocabulary, I’m going to explain how we are going to summarize. Our class helpers are going to hand out some bookmarks to everyone. These bookmarks are very special because you are all going to write the rules for summarizing on them with your pencil. I’m going to pull up the rules on the projector, and as we talk about them I want you to write them on your bookmark. [Pull up rules on projector] These are the rules we use when we are summarizing. The first one is “find important information.” We need to find the most important information from the text, or the main ideas. If you see something in a text that’s really importation, you should underline it or, if you’re reading in your textbook, have a piece of paper reader to write down some key words. Go ahead and write the first rule down on your bookmark and put your eyes on me when you’re finished. [Allow 1-2 minutes for students to write down the rule.] The next rule is “take out any unnecessary or redundant information.” We talked about how only certain main ideas and important information is necessary to summarizing. When we know the meaning of the text and we find information that isn’t important to the meaning, we can take out our pencil and draw a line through it if it’s in an article like we’re reading in class today. You can write down the second rule now. [Allow another 1-2 minutes for writing.] The last rule is “write out a topic sentence.” This one can be a little tricky, even for adults. Once you’ve taken our all the unnecessary information and figured out the main ideas and important details, you can combine them into one topic sentence. Okay, so now write down the third rule on your book mark. Once you’re finished, you can place your book mark in your book so that it can help you to remember how to summarize later on.”

 

4. Have class helpers pass out the copies of “Polar Bears Listed as Threatened” and have a copy projected on the board on the overhead. Say: “Our class helpers are handing out copies of an article called “Polar Bears Listed as Threatened.” We are going to use this article to practice our summarizing skills as a class. This article is from National Geographic Kids. It’s about arctic polar bears. The climate, or weather, is getting warmer and the Arctic sea is melting, and this is causing the Polar bears there to become endangered. The United States knows this and it still uses areas were these polar bears live to try and find oil. Do you think that this is a good thing? Do you think there’s anything we can do to help polar bears? [Allow time for class discussion] Now, we are going to read the article and summarize it together. I’ll help you with the first paragraph and then you all will try the rest on your own. First, I’m going to draw a line through any redundant and unnecessary information. Next, we’ll go back and highlight the important information and main ideas that we see. Last, we’re going to write a topic sentence in the margin for every paragraph. Follow along on the first paragraph and copy my marks as I mark them.”

      “Let’s start with the first sentence. I’ll read it out loud and then I’ll highlight the main ideas.”

      Polar bears were added to the list of threatened species and will receive special protection under United States law.

      “So that whole sentence had lots of important information. Let’s take a look at the next one.”

      In his statement, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne noted that the decline of Arctic sea ice is the greatest threat to the bears.

 

            “I crossed out the information from the part that talked about who made the statement and just noted the information that said why bears are becoming endangered.”

           

            Polar bears live in the Arctic and hunt seals and other fatty marine mammals from sea ice. They also travel, mate, and sometimes give birth on the ice. But sea ice is melting as the planet warms, and it is predicted to continue to do so for several more decades.

 

“In that sentence, I crossed out “polar bears” because they’re redundant information and we already know that the article is about polar bears. I highlighted “hunt” and “sea ice” because that’s important information. I crossed out what they hunted because it doesn’t have anything to do with what the article is about. I highlighted “sea ice is melting as the planet warms” because this is why the polar bear is becoming endangered.”

 

“Everyone’s articles look great. Now that we’ve read that paragraph, we need to write the topic sentence. By asking ourselves what the main idea of the paragraph is we can find the topic sentence. So, what is the paragraph about? We have to combine all the really important and main ideas from the paragraph and put them together into one sentence. My topic sentence is going to be ‘Polar bears were added to the list of threatened species by the United States because the sea ice is melting as the planet warms and this is the greatest threat to the bears.” [Model writing the topic sentence in the margin of the article.]

 

5. Have students work in pairs to summarize the next paragraph. Remind them to read, discuss, highlight, and cross out, and then write a topic sentence in the margin. Let them work for five to seven minutes, then display the annotated paragraph on the projector. Explain your reasoning behind al the annotations. Ask if anyone has any questions and make sure all students are understanding by having them close their eyes and holding a thumbs up if they understand and a thumbs down if they don’t. Explain further if they need more help.

 

6. Have students summarize the rest of the article independently. Leave the summarizing rules up on the projector so that the students have it as a reminder. Remind them of their rules and how to highlight and cross out, then have them write a topic sentence in the margin of each paragraph.

 

7. Have students write their names on their articles and collect them to assess their understanding of summarizing. Display the comprehension questions on the projector and have students answer them on the lined paper they were given. Have them write their names on them and then collect them to assess their learning.

 

 

The following checklist will be used to assess each student’s summarization skills.

 

When summarizing, did the student:

YES

NO

Construct a simple, topic sentence answering the question?

 

 

Delete unimportant information?

 

 

Include supporting details?

 

 

Delete repeated information?

 

 

Organize summary with big idea?

 

 

 

Comprehension Questions:

  • What does threatened mean?

  • Why are polar bears “threatened?”

  • What caused polar bears to become threatened? 

  • Is there anything going on to try and stop polar bears from being threatened?

 

Resources

 

Clark, Jessica. “Snowy Summaries!”

https://sites.google.com/site/mrsclarkslessondesigns/home/reading-to-learn-lesson-plan

 

Clarke, Katie. “Super Summarizers!”

https://sites.google.com/site/kmc0044ctrd/home/reading-to-learn-lesson

 

Carter, Lauren. “Flying Through Summarization!”

https://sites.google.com/site/ctrdlaurencarter/reading-to-learn

 

Goins, Hillary. “Ready, Set, Summarize!”

https://sites.google.com/site/ctrdhillarygoins/reading-to-learn-lesson-design

 

 “Polar Bears Listed as Threatened” National Geographic Kids

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/animalsnature/polar-bears-threatened/

 

 Murray, Bruce. Making Sight Words. Linus Publications. 2012. Print

 

Clipart: http://www.clipsahoy.com/webgraphics3/aw5082.htm

 

Bookmark (print for each student and cut out for each student):

 

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