Reading to Learn with Rays
By Anna Ickes
For readers to develop their skills, they must learn to read beyond only recognizing words.To promote actual comprehension, students must learn to summarize. Summarizing is the ability to separate the main points or arguments from facts. This lesson will teach students how to summarize what they are reading and to learn how to extract the main points of their readings. In this lesson students will read articles and then be able to summarize the article by including the main ideas and omitting trivial facts.
Materials:
● “Great White Sharks”
● “Mobula Ray”
● Highlighters
● black markers
● Paper
● pencil.
Procedure:
1. Explain what it means to summarize a text. "To summarize a reading means that we look at what is really important and pull that out. We ignore things when repeated or if it is not important to the main story. Example: I have a horse. My horse is brown. I ride my horse down the road during the fall. The trees’ leaves are changing color. To summarize it, I would say instead: I ride my brown horse "
2. Let’s use an article for practice together “Class, this is a fascinating article about Great White Sharks and how they live in our oceans. Once you have finished reading, think over some of the important things you learned while reading this article.”
3. Let’s look at this passage together:
“Sharks count on the element of surprise as they hunt. When they see a seal at the surface of the water, sharks will often position themselves underneath the seal. Using their tails as propellers, they swim upward at a fast sprint, burst out of the water in a leap called a breach, and fall back into the water with the seal in their mouths. They can smell a single drop of blood from up to a third of a mile (0.53 kilometers) away. Sharks don't chew their food; they rip off chunks of meat and swallow them whole. They can last a month or two without another big meal.”
Let’s summarize this together. What are the important points: that a shark is fast, they eat seals, and they swallow their food whole. So we could reduce the passage to this:
“Using their strong sense of smell and quick swimming, Great Whites can catch its prey by surprise and swallow them whole.”
4. "Look at your copy of “Great White Sharks” to look at the next paragraph. Use a highlighter to mark the important details and mark out the unimportant. Do not include the information you have marked out in your summaries."
5. Pair up the students to compare their summaries. What did they both think was important? What was different? If you included something different than your partner, why did you think it was important?
6. For the assessment: Have each child pull out their copy of “Mobula Rays.” Highlight the important points and mark out the unimportant in the following passage:
“Mobula rays live in warm oceans throughout the world. These fish have a pair of winglike fins that can extend up to 17 feet. The fins help the rays rocket from the sea when they leap. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why all nine species of mobula rays do these jumps. But they think it may be to show off for a potential mate, get rid of parasites, or communicate.
Mobula rays are as good at swimming as they are at jumping. As they travel, they move their fins up and down to steer through the water. Even baby mobula rays, born at 25 pounds with their fins curled, are gifted gliders. The babies, called pups, immediately unfold their fins and swim off.”
Answer the following questions with their summaries:
- What environment do Mobula rays live in?
- What is something special and unexplained that rays do?
- When are rays able to swim?
- How do rays use their fins to swim?
References:
National Geographic article about White Sharks
National Geographic article about Mobula Ray
Shafer, Leah; Learning to Read to Learn