Summarizing with Sea Turtles
Rationale: The goal of reading is reading comprehension. An important part of reading comprehension is getting the overall message of a passage. An important strategy to understand the message is summarization. In this lesson, students will learn to summarize a passage by noting the important information, crossing out the unnecessary information, and describing the passage in a few sentences.
Materials:
Poster with summarization steps
Poster with paragraph 3 (from article) typed out in big font
Thick Sharpie poster marker & highlighter (for teacher)
Highlighters (one for each student)
Notebook Paper (two pages for each student)
Pencils (one for each student)
Individual copies of the National Geographic Kids article about sea turtles:
Summarization checklist (one for each student; see bottom of page)
Comprehension quiz (one for each student; see bottom of page)
Procedures:
[Explain why summarization is important.] Say: “When we read a text, we could spend all day trying to remember all the words and details of that text. Good readers do not try to remember every little detail that they read. Instead, good readers summarize. Summarizing is how we take large readings of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth remembering. Good readers use summarization strategies to remember only the important points the author is making about the topic. This helps when we are reading a book or text with hundreds of words. All the parts are not always worth remembering, it is what we learn from the text and the overall message that we need to take away.
2. [Hang summarization poster on board & review summarization steps.] Say: “When we summarize, we are going to do three things:
1. Cross out any unimportant or repeated information, fluff, that is not important to the text or for us to remember.
2. Find and highlight the important information, terms, lessons, main ideas that is essential to the text.
3. Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted. For example, this would be one of the main things that we remember or take away from the passage.”
3. Say: “I will demonstrate how to do this with you all with a passage about sea turtles, which is the article you are going to be reading today.
Booktalk: Is anyone’s favorite animal a sea turtle? Where have you seen sea turtles before? Do you know why a sea turtles shell is so important? These are some of the questions you will be learning the answers to today. I want everyone to write down a question at the top of their paper that they have about sea turtles. I wonder if by the end of the article if everyone’s questions will be answered!”
4. [Teach class about important vocabulary in the passage.] Say: “Another important part in reading comprehension is understanding vocabulary in the passage. We are going to go over a few words together that you will see in the article that we are going to read today.” [For each word: explain the word in simple language, model how to use the word (What does it mean? What doesn’t it mean?), provide sample questions using the word, and scaffold by making a sentence using the word for students to complete.]
WORDS: repellent, entangle, insulating, extinction
Example: Say: “Extinction: One of the words in our passage is extinction; let’s look at what it means.
1. Extinction means the process of a species disappearing.
2. A species of animals would be heading towards extinction if there were only a few animals of that species left. A species of animals would not be heading towards extinction if one animal of a certain species died.
3. Which of these is an example of extinction: one panda of a certain species died, or multiple pandas of a certain species died and there are only a few of them left.
4. Rhinos are headed towards extinction because…(there are often hunted for their horns.)
5. [Hang poster with paragraph 3 on it beside poster with summarization rules. Teacher needs thick sharpie and highlighter. Pass out the sea turtle article to each student along with highlighter and pencil.]
Say: “Here is a paragraph from our article. I am going to show you how I summarize this paragraph and you can follow along and do it with me on your paper. First let’s go back over our summarization steps.
1. Cross out any unimportant or repeated information, fluff, that is not important to the text or for us to remember.
2. Find and highlight the important information, terms, lessons, main ideas that is essential to the text.
3. Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted. For example, this would be one of the main things that we remember or take away from the passage.”
First, I need to cross out any unimportant or repeated information. I can cross out sentence 3 because sentence 3 is not important to the main idea of the paragraph. Next, I need to highlight the important information. I think that sentences 1 and 2 are important to the paragraph so I am going to highlight both sentences. Both of these sentences add information and understanding to the article making them important to highlight!”
“Green sea turtles spend most of their lives underwater, where they can rest for up to five hours at a time before coming up for air. When active, they typically alternate between being underwater and coming up to the surface to breathe air. Green sea turtles can also sunbathe on land.”
“Now I am going to look at my highlighted information above and create a topic sentence. By looking at my highlighted information I can come up with this as my topic sentence [write topic sentence below the paragraph on poster so students can see]: Sea turtles are actively living underwater and resurfacing for air.
6. Say: “Now I want you to use the summarization rules we discussed on a paragraph. We will do the first one together as a class.”
“Unlike most other sea turtles, adult green sea turtles eat a primarily plant-based diet consisting of seaweed and sea grass. Scientists believe these green foods give the sea turtle’s fat its green color. The shell of the green sea turtle is usually shades of a brown or olive color.”
Say: “What is unnecessary information can we cross out? Correct, we can cross out the last sentence because it is mainly talking about their diet not their shell. So, what are we left with? Right, we are left with the first and second sentence. Let’s read these two sentences and see if we can combine them into one sentence to create a topic sentence. We can combine our two sentences to make the topic sentence: [have students give solutions to create a topic sentence this is not something the teacher is coming up with, talk it through and prompt ideas they should come up with solutions]. Sea turtles primarily eat seaweed and sea grass which makes the fat of the turtle a green color.
7. [Pass out 2 pieces of paper to each student for them to write their topic sentences on.] Say: “Now you finish reading the article and use your summarizing rules to make a topic sentence for each paragraph. When you are finished, you will have a good summary and understanding of the article. This will help you remember important facts about sea turtles. Don’t summarize the unimportant or repeated information. This ‘fluff’ is only written to help you understand the main ideas. When you summarize you are writing a short version of the article in your own words while including only the important information. After you finishes both of your summaries, turn and talk to your partner. What is cool about this is that while we are all reading the same article everyone’s summaries will be different. I want you to write down at least two differences your partner’s summary had compared to yours and 1 similarity. We will have a short quiz after everyone finishes their summaries and turn and talks.”
8. Assessment: [Collect each student’s summary of the article and evaluate the summarization using the following checklist:]
______ Collected important information
______ Ignored fluff and only included main ideas
______ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph and made sense
______ Sentences organized coherently into essay form
9. Quiz: [Pass out a quiz to each student.]
1. How much do sea turtles weigh?
2. What do sea turtles nest along?
3. Where do sea turtles spend most of their lives?
4. What do sea turtles eat?
5. How long do sea turtles live?
Answers:
300-400 pounds
Coastlines
Underwater
Seaweed and sea grass
About 80 years
References:
Sea Turtle Text
Paula Anderson, “Let’s Sea How to Summarize”