Summarizing with Sea Turtles
Reading to Learn
Sarah Kowal
Rationale: The overall goal of reading is reading comprehension. An important part of reading comprehension is getting the overall message of a passage. An important strategy to get to the message is summarization. In this lesson, students will learn to summarize a passage by highlighting 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 students)
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 larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering. Good readers use summarization strategies to remember only the important points the author is making about the topic. This helps reduce a text that may have hundreds or thousands of words into a compact gist that is easy to remember."
2. [Hang summarization poster on board & review summarization steps.] Say: “ When we summarize we are going to do three things:
1st: Cross out any unimportant or repeated information (or fluff) that isn’t essential to the message of the text.
2nd: Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text.
3rd: Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted.”
3. Say: “In a few minutes I’m going to show you how I’d do these steps of summary with a paragraph on sea turtles, which is the article you are going to be reading today. ‘Booktalk’: Is anyone’s favorite animal a sea turtle? Do you know what family the sea turtle belongs to? Do you know how sea turtles eat? 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.”
4. [Teach class about important vocabulary in the passage.] Say: “Another important strategy in reading comprehension is understanding important 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 elephant of a certain species died or multiple elephants of a certain species died and there are only a few of them left.
4. Pandas are heading towards extinction because…(there are only a few of the species left.)
5. [Hang poster with paragraph 3 on it beside poster with summarization rules. Teacher needs thick sharpie and highlighter. Pass out the sea otter 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.
1st: Cross out any unimportant or repeated information (or fluff) that isn’t essential to the message of the text.
2nd: Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text.
3rd: Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted.”
First, I need to cross out any unimportant or repeated information. I can cross out sentence 3 because sentence 3 isn’t important to the main idea of the paragraph. Next, I need to highlight the important information. I think that sentence 1 and 2 are important to the paragraph so I am going to highlight both sentences.
“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 for a few minutes and coming up to the surface to breathe air for a few seconds. Green sea turtles are also known to sunbathe on land.”
Lastly I am going to form a topic sentence from my highlighted information. 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 live underwater but come to the surface to breathe air every few minutes.
6. Say: “Now I want you to use the summarization rules we discussed on a paragraph.”
“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 unimportant information can we cross out? Yes, we can cross out the last sentence. 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: 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 I’d like you to 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 of the article. This will help you remember important facts about sea otters. 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. We will have a short quiz after everyone finishes their topic sentences.”
8. Assessment: [Collect each student’s summary of the article and evaluate the summarization using the following checklist:]
______ Collected important information
______ Ignored trivia and examples in summary
______ Significantly reduced the text from the original
______ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph
______ Sentences organized coherently into essay form
9. Quiz: [Pass out a quiz to each student.]
1. How much do sea turtles weigh? (300-400 pounds)
2. What do sea turtles nest along? (Coastlines)
3. Where do sea turtles spend most of their lives? (Underwater)
4. What do sea turtles eat? (seaweed and sea grass)
5. How long do sea turtles live for? (About 80 years)
References:
Sea Turtle Text
Paula Anderson, “Let’s Sea How to Summarize”