Swimming and Summarizing with Sharks

Rationale: Reading is a vital skill in young children and it can be the first the in learning. When children start to read long texts they need to be able to comprehend them, and with that comes the skill to summarize longer texts. A goal for children is reading comprehension and being able to fully understand the message. In every text there is important and unimportant information and students need to know the difference between this so they can focus on the main idea and dig deeper. A method for summarization is called the about-point method where readers ask two questions from the text, one being what the text is about and the other is what the main point is. this helps the students go through each different point and figure out what the important points are. This lesson teaches students how to pick out the important information in longer texts, learn to summarize it, and demonstrate their understand of the whole text. The lesson tests comprehension skills and get rid of the unimportant details.

Materials:

1. Pencil and paper

2. “Shark Facts for Kids” article from Kids.Kiddle

3. Assessment Checklist

4. Comprehension Quiz

Procedures:

1. Say: “Todays lesson is going to be on learning some ways to summarize a passage or an article. Think about a time when you read the best book and wanted to explain to someone without them having to read the entire book. What did you do in that situation? You probably told them just the important parts of the story that mattered to the full main idea. What is it called when we explain only the main points of a story? (Allow time for students to answer) If you said summarization then you are correct! Summarizing books and stories helps give the main idea of what we read without telling the entire story and all of its details. Summaries should be short and to the point, this helps the reader understand and comprehend what you have just read. Today we are going to read an article about facts about sharks and practice our summarization skills.”

2. Say: “Does anyone know any facts about sharks they want to share? (Allow students to respond and write responses on the board, adding more as they read the article they find important). Sharks are a lot like many other animals in the sea, they just look scary because they have more teeth! Lets read our article and find out more facts besides how many teeth the sharks have!

3. Say: “I want us to learn the 3 important rules of summarization and write them down. Lets pay close attention and try our best to remember these golden rules. The first rule is “delete”, when we read information that is unimportant and does not support the main idea of the text, we will cross it out and get rid of it. Something to think about and remember is if a piece of information is repeated, we can mentally cross it out once we have already read it again. Our next rule is to shorten the information a little bit. Taking what we have decided is unimportant, leaving it out, and taking long parts into shorter parts. The last rule of summarization is “create”. Once we have decided the unimportant parts of the reading and crossed them out leaving us with only the parts that are important, we can create main idea sentences. A great strategy to use when summarizing texts is the about-point strategy. It got its name because the reader can ask themselves these two important questions, the first is what is the text about and the second is what is the main point the author is trying to make? Find an “umbrella term” that represents all of the important points from the text.”

4. Say: “We will work together as a class to summarize the first paragraph using our new strategy called about-point. First let’s read the first paragraph one time to see what it is about.

"Sharks are a superorder of fish called the Selachimorpha. They, like other Chondrichthyes, have skeletons made of cartilage instead of bone. Cartilage is tough, rubbery material which is less rigid than bone. Cartilaginous fish also include skates and rays.

There are more than 350 different kinds of sharks, such as the great white and whale sharks. Fossils show that sharks have been around for 420 million years, since the early Silurian.

Most sharks are predators, meaning they hunt and eat fish, marine mammals, and other sea creatures. However, the largest shark eats krill, like whales. This is the whale shark, the largest fish in the world. Some common kinds of shark include the hammerhead shark, the great white shark, the tiger shark, and the mako shark."

Our first step is to figure out what this paragraph is about. It is about some simple facts about sharks. We need to decide what the main points are in this paragraph. Sharks are made of cartilage, they come in many different forms, they are predators who eat other sea animals and they have been around more than 420 million years. We can say “Sharks have been around for a

long time which means there are a wide variety of shark species, all who eat other sea animals.”

5. Say: “Now that we have worked through the first paragraph together it is your turn to read the next paragraph all by ourselves and then work together to come up with a topic sentence using the about-point method. Here is our next paragraph”

“Sharks come in many different shapes and sizes, but most are long and thin (also called streamlined), with powerful jaws. Their teeth are constantly replaced throughout their lives. Sharks eat so violently they often break a few teeth, so new teeth grow continuously in a groove just inside the mouth and move forward from inside the mouth on "conveyor belts" formed by the skin in which they are attached to. In its lifetime, a shark can lose and regrow as many as 30,000 teeth.”

(Now is the time we give students to read through the paragraph on the board, once they are done we say:) What was this paragraph about? (Students answer) Yes, this is about sharks teeth! Now that we know what it is about lets decide the key points that the author is trying to make here. (Allow students to discuss and answer). Awesome! This paragraph talks about how all sharks have powerful teeth that allow them to bite into other fish and there teeth fall out and grow back all through their lives. How can we condense these two ideas into one topic sentence? (Wait for children to answer) That is great, we can say “sharks eat so powerfully that their teeth fall out and grow back almost every day”

6. Say: We have read just a little bit of this article together, now I want you to finish reading the article and cross off the unimportant information, highlight the important information, and make some main idea sentences like we did earlier for each paragraph! I am here to help if you aren’t sure about a paragraph. Once we are done I want you to write down the steps you did in your summarization and hand it to me.

Assessment: hand out comprehension quiz when students are finishing up their summarizing. I will use this to asses each students summarization skills.

____collected important information

____ignored trivia and examples in summary

____reduced the text from the original

____sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph

____sentences were organized into essay form

Quiz:

1. What is one reason that sharks use their fins for?

2. Sharks have many senses from their snout, name 2 of those senses and how they use their snout to father that information?

3. What sense do sharks use to know when a prey is many miles away?

4. Do sharks lay eggs or do they go to the shore to have their pups?

5. Name 2 reasons why sharks need many rows of teeth?

References:

Shark Facts for Kids: https://kids.kiddle.co/Shark

Steele, Morgan. “Summarizing with Sharks” . https://mes01937.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn