Reading to Learn Design

Summarizing with Tigers
Caroline Brandt

Rationale:

Once students can read fluently, the next step to comprehension is summarizing. Summarization uses an effective method called about-point. In this method there are two critical questions that are asked about the text. They are: A) What is the text about? B) What is the main point the writer is making about that topic? The first question helps students identify the topic, which will be the subject in the topic sentence. In the second question, the students pull out the main important umbrella point from the many points the author makes. The main point becomes the predicate of the topic sentence. The point of this lesson is to help children distinguish what information is important and what is less significant, be able to understand what they are reading, and summarize the text.

Materials:

Pencils
Paper
Summarization checklist
Comprehension quiz
A copy of Tiger article for each student
Vocabulary list (habitat, carnivore, predator, and endangered)
White board and dry erase marker

Procedures:

1. Say: “Summarizing is when we can remember important points the author makes after we read a text. It can be hard for us to remember all of the story, so we will use summarization strategies to help us remember some important points. As we learn summarization, we will read a text and then be able to reduce the text into just a few sentences making it easier to remember what the text was about. Today we are going to read an article about tigers and learn how to summarize this passage.”

2. Say: “There are many methods you can use to help become better at summarizing, today we are going to learn about the about-point method. When using this strategy, the reader asks themselves two questions: What is the text about? What is the main point the writer is trying to make? These questions are important to ask yourself while reading so you can pick out the important parts of the text. The second question is more complex, so you will need to combine all the important and keys parts together.”

3. Say: “Before I start passing out the articles, does anyone know anything about tigers?” (Allow time for students to respond) That’s right, tigers are the largest wild cats and usually have orange and black stripes! Now let’s look at some vocabulary words. The first word is habitat. The sentence in our article with the word "habitat" in it is: "Tigers' habitat has also dwindled seriously as humans have developed land for uses such as farming and logging." Does anyone know what a habitat is? (Allow time for students to answer) Yes, it is the natural home or environment of an animal, plant, or other organism! I can use the definition and context clues to figure out what habitat means and that helps me to understand the text. Now, I want you to write a sentence that uses the word "habitat" in it. Our next word is carnivore, does anyone knows what this means? Carnivore is an animal that feeds on meat. Does anyone know what predator means? (Allow time for students to answer) A predator is an animal that lives by killing and eating other animals. Our last vocabulary word is endangered. Has anyone ever heard of this word or know what it means? (Give students time to respond) For an animal to be endangered means it is at a serious risk of extinction. Great! That is all our vocabulary words. I want you to try and remember these when reading the article to help you better understand.”

4. Pass out the articles and the vocabulary sheets to each student. Say: “Now that you have received your article, I want you to read silently and summarize the paragraphs as you read. (Read Article) Now that we are done reading, what do we need to do? (Allow time for answers) Correct! We need to pick out the important information. Let’s look at this paragraph together and see what you think is important.

The powerful predator generally hunts alone, able to bring down prey such as deer and antelope. Tigers wait until dark to hunt. The tiger sprints to an unsuspecting animal, usually pulling it off its feet with its teeth and claws. If the prey animal is large, the tiger bites its throat to kill it; smaller prey is usually killed when the tiger breaks its neck. Tigers have been known to eat up to 60 pounds of meat in one night, but more often they consume about 12 pounds during a meal. It may take days for a tiger to finish eating its kill. The cat eats until it's full, and then covers the carcass with leaves and dirt. The tiger comes back to feed some more.

The article says, ‘The powerful predator generally hunts alone, able to bring down prey such as deer and antelope?" Say, "Is this sentence important? Should we keep it? Yes, we should! Should we keep, ‘The tiger sprints to an unsuspecting animal, usually pulling it off its feet with teeth and claws.’ (Allow time for answers). This sentence is an extra detail and not super important to the main point of this paragraph, so we can get rid of it. What about the sentence 'Tigers have been known to eat up to 60 pounds of meat in one night, but more often they consume about 12 pounds during a meal.' This is where it gets tricky! We need to go through this sentence and get rid of the information we don’t need. So instead of leaving the full sentence we can say 'Tigers can eat large amounts of meat during each meal'. Awesome job everyone!”

5. Say: “Now that we have worked on summarization together, I want you to try by yourself. I want you try the about-point strategy on this article. I want you to take your paper and pencil and answer two questions. (Write the two questions on the board: “What is the text about” and “What is the main point the writer is trying to make”) If you can’t remember them, refer to the white board. Ok, everyone get started!”

6. Say: “Great! Now that everyone is done, we are going to take a comprehension quiz. This is going to see if you could remember the important parts of the article. After we finish the quiz, we will have an assessment.”

Comprehension Questions: