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Monkeying into Summaries

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Reading to Lean Design 

Gracie Champion 

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Rationale: Students need to learn to read for many reasons but the most important reason is to learn to comprehend. One strategy for learning to comprehend text is to summarize. Summarization is skill used when reading to learn. Summarization will also help students eliminate unnecessary information so they can focus on the main topic of the text. In this lesson students will learn to summarize by reading an article called “Spider Monkeys.” They will learn how to highlight and pick out main ideas and I will assess them by asking a few questions about the article at the end of the lesson.

 

Materials:

  • Pencils

  • Class set of “Spider Monkey” Article

  • One “Spider Monkey” article for the teacher

  • Doc cam to show the class what I am doing with the article

  • Highlighters

  • Paper for students with the quiz questions on it.

  • Summarization checklist

  1. ____ Highlighted important facts

  2. ____ Found meaningful facts in each paragraph

  3. ____ Summary sentences make sense

  4. ____ Sentences fit together and summarize the article

 

Procedures:

    1: Now that we have all become fluent readers, let’s become good readers! An important factor in becoming a good reader is to understand what we are reading. A page of texts can contain hundreds of words and it would take forever to remember all the details in a text you read, so instead we use a strategy called summarization. Summarization helps us you remember the important points of text rather than minor details. Summarizing is like reducing a passage into a short description. We will practice summarizing and then you will each try some on your own.

    2: Today, we are going to read an article about spider monkeys. This article talks about spider monkeys.  Does anyone know what a spider monkey is? [Wait for response]. Very good! A spider monkey is a certain type of monkey that have long thin arms and bodies. Does Anybody know how spider monkeys swing from different trees? [Wait for response]. That’s right, they use their hook like hands that allow them to swing through trees.

            3: Before we start reading I have a few instructions for you to help you summarize. First, we want to discover what the main idea of the article is. Second, I want you to highlight important facts in the article. Third, I want you to write a few short sentences summarizing the article you read. Lastly to summarize you need to find an umbrella term for everything that happens in the paragraph. Before we begin reading our article, let’s go over our vocabulary words, friends. Being familiar with new vocabulary words will help you have a better understanding of the meaning of the article.

                  Vocabulary list:

*prehensile

*opposable

*robust

*genus

*Ateles


4. *This is repeated for each vocabulary word listed above.

           

                  -Lets look at what the word prehensile means. Prehensile means capable of grasping.

 

 

                 -What are some animals that might have prehensile tails? ....Yes, opossum is correct. They can hang upside down with their tails!

Great job, friends!

               

                 -A prehensile tail is a tail that can grasps things. An example of this is when a monkey hangs upside down or grasps a tree limb with its tail.

 

                 -Finish this sentence: A prehensile tail is a tail that can…

             

              Possible responses:

              .... grasps things

 

    5: Say: We are going to read the first paragraph of “Spider Monkeys” together. Let’s begin by reading the first sentence. “Spider Monkeys have long, thin arms with hook like hands that allow them to swing through trees. That sounds pretty important to me. Let’s highlight the first sentence. That also seems like it is an important detail of the article so let’s write it down. Continue doing this throughout the first paragraph.

6:  Now that we have read the first paragraph let’s create a topic sentence for the paragraph we read. When constructing a topic sentence we want to combine the important information. Let me show you. “Spider Monkeys have long thin bodies, they can swing through trees, and they like to eat fruit.”

7: There are a few more paragraphs in this article and I want you to finish reading to summarize the rest of the article. Don’t forget to highlight the important information. After you have finished highlighting then write a few sentences to help summarize the article you read. Be sure you are doing a good job summarizing because we will have a quiz.

 

Assessment: Students will take a short quiz on the article they read and I will also collect their articles to determine if they are summarizing correctly.

 

Quiz

  1. What kind of bodies do spider monkeys have?

  2. What do spider monkeys like to eat?

  3. What type of community does the brown spider monkey live in?

  4. Where do spider monkeys get their name from?

  5. How did spider monkeys get their name?

 

Summarize Checklist

  1. ____ Highlighted important facts

  2. ____ Found meaningful facts in each paragraph

  3. ____ Summary sentences make sense

  4. ____ Sentences fit together and summarize the article

 

References:

 McCormack, A. A. (2014, November 17). Spider Monkey Animal Profile - National Geographic Kids. 

 

Stewart, Kaley. Summarizing with Sea Turtles

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