Jenna's Lesson Plans

Rationale:

Once students can read fluently and with limited errors, students will be able to move on to reading for comprehension and gaining understanding from what they read. Once they do this, they are reading to learn new things. This lesson design is for helping to show students how to summarize. To do this, they must get rid of all repeated or useless information, find a general term and create a topic sentence.

 

Materials:

•Blank Paper

•Pencils

• Picture of telegraph

•Projector

•Highlighters

•Rubric for grading summaries

•Document Camera

•Thomas Edison article

 

Procedures:

1. We are going to work on summarization today! This is narrowing down our article so that all we have left are the important facts. To do this we have to figure out what is important and keep that and eliminate what is unimportant or repeated. We will need to figure out how to find information we can get rid of, then figure out the main idea, and the facts that support that idea.

 

2. I am now going to pass out a blank sheet of paper to everyone. I want you all to take a marker and divide your paper into 3 equal sections. (Teacher shows how to do this on doc cam.) We are going to use this sheet to make a “cheat sheet” on how to summarize articles. In the first column, we will write the first step which is to underline any important information that you pick out of the article. In the next column, write that next you need to cross out any information that is unimportant or is repeated. In the 3rd column, write the step of organizing your important information and coming up with a main idea statement. You can use the back of the paper if you think of anything else you want to remember while you summarize.

 

 

3. I am going to give you each an article about Thomas Edison. You may know him as the man to invent the light bulb, but he did so many other things including making over 1,200 inventions and got his first job when he was 12! The article also gives some other really cool information about him, so let’s read it to see what else he did!

 

(puts first paragraph on the doc cam) Lets read the first paragraph together:

Thomas Alva Edison lit up the world with his invention of the electric light. Without him, the

world might still be a dark place. However, the electric light was not his only invention. He also

invented the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and over 1,200 other things. About every two weeks Edison created something new.

 

5. So first we want to go through and decide what information is not important then underline the information that is important. So what is important in the first sentence? Yes, just that he invented electric light. “Without him, the world might still be a dark place.” Is not super important so we can cross that sentence out. The next sentence, “However, the electric light was not his only invention.” Has a very similar meaning the the sentence after it, so that is repeated so we can cross out that sentence too. We do have some important information in the next sentence, though. We can underline “phonograph, motion picture camera, and 1,200 other things” because these are specific examples and amount of inventions. Then the last sentence we can underline “every two weeks” because that’s how often he invented new things. Now we can combine out important information into a main idea statement: Edison invented electric light, but he also invented something new every week leading to over 1,200 inventions such as the phonogram and motion picture camera.

  

6. Lets talk about a new vocab word that you will find in the article. The word is telegraph. A telegraph is a device that transmits messages a long distance using wires and electric signals. (Show students a picture of a telegraph device on the board). Depending on how it is used, a telegraph could be the device or the message that is sent through it. In our article, it is used as the device. Could you send a telegraph without a wire? Finish this sentence: They used a telegraph to…

 

7.Now that you know how to summarize, I want you to finish reading the article by yourself and then summarize it. You will need to underline the important information and cross out the things that are not important. Once you finish finding what is important, I want you to write a short summary paragraph of the article and turn it in. I will walk around and answer any questions that you have.

 

8. I will call up students individually to ask them a few reading comprehension questions to check for reading and comprehension.

• How did Thomas Edison lose his first job?

• What sense did Edison lack in?

• How was he educated?

• What is a stock-ticker?

 

Assessment:

I will go through and assess students’ summaries with the following evaluation:

 

In his/her summary, did the student...

•Delete insignificant information?  YES / NO

•Delete repeated information? YES / NO

•Select important information from the article?  YES / NO

• Write 3-5 good, concise sentences?  YES / NO

•Choose the correct main topic for this article?  YES / NO

•Organize summary with big ideas? YES / NO

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Reference:

 

Thomas Edison. https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/lancet/third_grade/edison_3rd.pdf

 

Supreme Summarizers, Caroline Coleman. http://carolinecoleman199.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn

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