Rationale: The goal of reading is to comprehend what is being read. Sometimes, we find that comprehension is a barrier during reading. Summarization is a strategy that can be used to allow students to take the important information from a passage and remember it for further use while not focusing on trivial information. This can be done by highlighting important information, crossing out unnecessary information, and describing the passage. The students will be finding an umbrella term for the events that happen in a text. The purpose of this lesson is to teach students how to summarize by asking themselves questions and remembering the important steps of summarization.

 

Materials:

• Class set of the Mission to Mars article, including one for the teacher

• Lined Paper, 2 pieces for each student

• Pencils

• Class set of highlighters

• Summarization Rules Poster

• Assessment for Article

 

Procedures:

1. Say: “Have you ever read a super cool book or article and wanted to tell your friends about it? Did you read them the whole thing, or did you just tell them the important parts of it? Raise your hand to tell me! [call on student] That’s right! You only say the important parts of what you read. This is called summarizing. Summarization is a very helpful strategy good readers use to help comprehend or understand what they are reading. If you can summarize a book or article, it is a good sign that you are able to understand what you’ve read.”

2. Say: “Now, we are going to practice our summarizing skills with an article about Mars. Mars is one of the planets in our solar system. It is the fourth planet from the sun. Let’s read our article to find out some cool facts about Mars!”

Say: Before we read the article, it is important to know how to look at the vocabulary. Let’s look at a few words that we might not know what they mean. The words atmosphere and astronomer may be words that we do not know what they mean. The atmosphere is just the gases that surround a planet. Astronomers study the galaxy and space. Let’s look at these words in their sentences. ‘The soil blows into the air (occasionally in planet-wide dust storms) to give the atmosphere a bloody tint.’ We can see that there is context in the sentence to give clues on what atmosphere means. ‘Water may have flowed on Mars long ago, in ancient seas and riverbeds that early astronomers confused for canals.’ We can see that astronomers were studying Mars and what it was made up of here.” “Now let’s practice a little. What is something we can find in our atmosphere? Right! Clouds! Where would an astronomer maybe work? NASA, that’s right too! Now, I want you guys to make a sentence that uses one of these words and we will go around the classroom and share our sentences!” Let students share sentences.

1. Say: “We have reviewed vocabulary that would be confusing and figured out their definitions. Let’s talk a little more about summarizing before we read our articles. There are three rules [point to poster with all the rules] ‘1. Cross out unimportant information, 2. Highlight important information, 3. Write a topic sentence.’ The first rule means that if you’ve read something that is not important to the meaning or it is a repeated fact you can cross it out. The second rule means that if you see something you find important, you should underline it or highlight it. The third rule is a little trickier and we will practice it together in a moment, but it means that once you have found what the paragraph is about and what the main idea is, you combine them to create a topic sentence. This sentence expresses all the important parts of the text.”

2. Say: “We are going to practice summarizing as a class before I let you do it on your own. Let’s look at a paragraph in our article.”

 

“Astronomers peering at Mars in the 17th and 18th centuries saw signs of life everywhere. Seas! Continents! Canals that carried water to Martian farms! You spot none of these features as your spaceship deploys its parachutes for touchdown on this cold desert world—but then you never expected to. Mars has been the subject of many myths; you intend to separate science fact from science fiction as you step on the surface of the red planet.”

 

“What parts of this paragraph are important? I think the parts that say, ‘Mars has been the subject of many myths; you intend to separate science fact from science fiction as you step on the surface of the red planet.’ I will highlight those parts of the paragraph, but I will cross out the part ‘but then you never expected to’ because we didn’t know that Mars didn’t have life. Now, let’s put those sentences together to make a topic sentence.

 

“So now that we’ve applied rules 1 and 2 of summarizing to this paragraph, I’m going to demonstrate how to use rule 3 and create a topic sentence using the parts I underlined. “Many myths were created about Mars ever since astronomers started studying it in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

 

1. Say: “Let’s continue to pick out important points in each paragraph of the article. Find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. Now continue reading the article by yourself this time. Summarize as much as you can, highlighting important parts and marking through unimportant details. I’ll come around and check your work.”

2. Say: “Once you’ve read the whole article and find the main ideas and details highlighted, write down a one-paragraph brief summary on the article. At the bottom of your article, write five new words you have never seen before you read this article and write their definitions/what you think they mean based on the context within the article. Any questions?”

3. After article completion, give students the quick assessment to take on their own and turn in.

 

Assessment/ Comprehension Questions:

1. What color planet is Mars known as?

2. How does Mars’ atmosphere have a bloody tint?

3. What is another color that Mars is?

4. When did astronomers start to study Mars?

5. What happens on Mars that makes the soil and dust blow up into the atmosphere?

 

Comprehension Checklist:

Did the students have a topic sentence for each paragraph?

Did students successfully delete unimportant information?

Did students successfully identify important information?

Did students use important information to make topic sentences?

 

References:

Bruce Murray, The Reading Genie

Mission to Mars, National Geographic Kids

Stringfellow, Erin. Summarizing with American Alligators.

 

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