Alexa Stephenson Reading to Learn Design

READING UP A STORM!

READING TO LEARN DESIGN

ALEXA STEPHENSON

Rationale: the goal of reading is comprehending what has been read. After fluency has been practiced and achieved, readers can learn how to and work on comprehension. Comprehensive reading is how well the student is understanding and remembering what they are reading. Comprehensive reading allows students to learn from what they are reading. In order to be able to read to learn, students must be able to master summarization of texts. Summarizing teaches students how to pick the most important information in the text while not focusing on minor details. The way to teach Summarization and comprehension skills is to take notes. By taking notes, students learn how to omit unnecessary and focus on the main ideas and major points of the text. This lesson will help students to learn how to find the main ideas in a text, construct meaning from the text, and summarize the text

Materials:

Paper, pencil, highlighter for every student

Summarization checklist (write on the board for students to put on book mark), copy of “Rain and Floods” article.

Bookmark strips (construction paper) for summarization rules:

1. Read the text

2. Decide what sentences from the text are most important that help say the main idea

3. Highlight the important information and take out minor details

4. Find an umbrella term for everything that happens in the paragraph by using highlighted sentences.

5. Write a summary sentence that explains what the text is about

Summarization grading rubric (under assessment)

Comprehension questions

Procedures:

1. Say: “today we are going to learn how to summarize a story. Summarizing is when we read a text and we say what important things happened. We are going to practice how to summarize by reading two stories. When we read each story we are going to determine what the main idea is, what supports the main idea, and what details we can leave out of our summary.

2. Say: “now we are going so learn the rules of summarizing. (Pass out book mark sized paper) I am going to write down how to summarize on the board and I want you to copy it on the piece of paper I just handed out. We will use this as a bookmark so that you all can refer back to it on how to summarize.

3. (Say and write down these steps): “Step one we are going to read the text. Step two is that we are going to decide what sentences from the text are most important (the ones that express key information and main ideas). Step three is to highlight the important information and omit the minor details. Step four is to find an umbrella term for everything that happens in the paragraph by using highlighted sentences. Step five is to write a summary sentence that explains what the text is about.

4. Say: “Now I am going to give you all the article “Rain and Floods” to read (pass out a copy of the passage for each student to read and highlight). Have you ever been outside when it’s rainy? Do you like the rain? Well rain and floods happen all over the United States everyday. We are going to read and find out what rain and floods are and what causes it.”

5. Read the first section together labeled “how does rain form?” Model the summarizing instructions that are on the newly made book marks by asking the class If each sentence is important or not. If they say yes and they are correct, highlight with the students. If they say no and they are correct, move pass the sentence without highlighting. Model how to write a summary of the passage for the class with the information that was highlighted as a class.

6. Say: “now students, I want you to read and highlight the important information in the rest of the article and write a one sentence summary for each section. Then write a three-five sentence summary over the entire article.”

7. After all the students have finished, go over what should have been highlighted and why and then ask students to read their summaries to the class. Allow time for students to fix their summaries and then take them up for assessment.

8. Now we are going to review vocabulary. We are going to talk about the word "absorb" from your text. Absorb is when you or something take in something else, whether it be when a sponge soaks up all of the water or when someone takes in a lot of information. So, you could say, "A sponge can absorb all of the water off the counter and is now very heavy and wet," or you could say, "The students absorbed all of the information in the math lesson today, so I know that they will all make A's on the test." So class, what would someone use if they were wet and they wanted to use something to absorb the water off of them? (answer: a towel) Now class, see if you can fill in the blank in this sentence. "When I dropped my phone, the protective case I had on it __________ the force of the fall and kept my phone screen from cracking." (answer: absorbed)

9. Ask the class comprehension questions about the passages and have them write down the answer on a sheet of paper. Say: “How are raindrops formed? How do floods happen? How can rain storms and floods affect people negatively? How is a monsoon like a flash flood and how are they different? How is rain different from snow?" Take up answers for assessment. Then say: “see how writing these summaries helped you remember the important parts of the story better? This is why we need to know how to summarize what we read.

Assessment:

questions to ask aloud and have students write down the answer to test comprehension:

How is rain formed?

What causes a flood?

How can flash floods affect people negatively?

How is monsoon different from a flash flood?

How is rain different from snow?

Reading summary activity rubric:

In his/her summary, did the student…

Delete insignificant information and highlight the important information? YES / NO

Write the main idea of the article? YES / NO

Write 3-5 good, concise sentences? YES / NO