Reading to Learn

Rationale:

The goal of this lesson is to teach students to summarize so they can comprehend what they are reading in order to learn. After students learn how to read and how to be fluent, they need to be able to understand what they are reading. Comprehending what you read is crucial to learn different concepts. In order to comprehend the content, students need to be able to summarize. This lesson with teach comprehension through written discussion of the readings. Summarizing a concept allows the teacher to see whether students are understanding the content.

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Materials:

Copies of reading

Pencils

Paper

Highlighters

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Procedure:

1. Say: Today we are going to be learning how to summarize. Does anyone know what it means to summarize?  [wait for them to respond] When we summarize, we explain what happened in the story we just read. We need to summarize to understand what we just read and to make sure we can get the main points of the story.

2. Say: Today we are going to be practicing how to summarize with an article about the food chain. We want to delete the information that is not important from our minds so that we can figure out what is important.

3. Say: What do you know about the food chain? Do you know what a food chain is? What do you want to know about the food chain?

4. Pass out the reading and some highlighters. Say: This story is about what order living things are in in the food chain. What do you think is going to come first?

5. Say: There is going to be some vocabulary that you may not know so let’s look at that first. Can anyone tell me what an Herbivore is? An Herbivore is an animal that eats just plants. An Herbivore might like to eat leaves. Can anyone tell me what a Carnivore is? A Carnivore is an animal that eats meat. A Carnivore might like to eat smaller animals like rabbits.

6. Say: I am going to read the first paragraph of this article and highlight what I think is important. I want you to follow along with me.

A food chain is a link between plants and animals. It starts with a plant. The next part of the link is a plant eater. When the prairie plants were uprooted, the animals that depended on them lost their food source. So, while the farmers produced more food for people, they broke the animals’ food chain. For example, if a bird needs seeds to eat and the plant is gone, that bird will not be able to survive. And the animals that ate that bird won’t have any food, either.

7. Say: Now I am going to summarize this paragraph by deleting the unimportant information. To do this, I am going to highlight the important parts.

A food chain is a link between plants and animals. It starts with a plant. The next part of the link is a plant eater. When the prairie plants were uprooted, the animals that depended on them lost their food source. So, while the farmers produced more food for people, they broke the animals’ food chain. For example, if a bird needs seeds to eat and the plant is gone, that bird will not be able to survive. And the animals that ate that bird won’t have any food, either.

8. Say: Now we are going to make a topic sentence out of the important information: The food chain is what connects plants and animals and it starts with plants.

9. Say: I want you to finish reading the article and highlight the important information in each paragraph. Then I want you to come up with a topic sentence for each paragraph. After we are all done, we are going to take a little quiz.

Assessment

Highlighted important information                       ___________

Crossed out or ignored unimportant information ___________

Reduced length of text                                          ___________

Sentences made sense with paragraph                  ___________

Sentences were complete                                      ___________

10. Quiz:

What is a food chain?

What is the first piece of the food chain?

What happens when we take away a part of the food chain?

What is an Herbivore?

What is a Carnivore?

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References:

Article

Bruce Cabell, Summary Raceway: Summarizing Fiction