Emily James 

Rationale: One of the most important reasons for teaching children how to read is comprehension. Knowing how to read is crucial in order for people to comprehend the world around them, and understanding what they are reading must occur in order happen. After students learn to read accurately and fluently, they can then move on to comprehension, or reading to learn. Summarization is a useful strategy that can be used to help with reading comprehension. This lesson is meant to help teach students to read to learn by using summarization. Summarizing includes deleting trivial or unhelpful and unnecessary information to zone in on the parts of the text that have more meaning and importance.

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Materials:

1. Individual copies of an article written for kids on sun bears from KidsZone.org (URL below).

2. Pencil and paper for each student. 

3. Summarization checklist and comprehension quiz (below).

                                          

Procedures: 

1. Explain to children why summarization is important: When we read a text, we would spend all day trying to remember all the words and all the details. Good readers don’t try to remember everything. They use summarization strategies to remember only the important points the author is making about the topic. In that way, they reduce a text that may have hundreds or thousands of words to a compact gist that is easy to remember.

 

2. The best way to summarize is to ask an easy question and a tough question, and you use your answers to make a topic sentence. The easy question is "What is the text about?" The tough question is "What is the main point the writer is making about that topic?" To answer this question, you have to think of an umbrella term for all the important points the writer is telling you.

 

3. In a few minutes, I’m going to show you how to summarize with a paragraph about sun bears, which is the article you are going to be reading today. Has anyone seen a bear? Who can give me some examples of the different species? Has anyone heard of a sun bear?

 

4. Let’s talk about an important vocabulary word you’ll be reading: Malayan. Malayan is a term we use to describe the country of Malaysia. “These apples are Malayan.” These people are from the country of Malaysia. Finish the sentence: The bear is Malayan, he is from….. Another word I want to draw your attention to is hibernate. When bears hibernate, they go to sleep for the winter. “Lots of animals hibernate for the winter” What other animals do you think hibernate? Finish the sentence “As the bear was getting ready to hibernate for the winter, he started to gather….

 

Here is a paragraph from the story:

 

A sun bear's diet consists of lizards, little birds, rodents, insects, termites, fruit and honey.  The long sharp claws of the sun bear are handy for tearing open trees where insect and bee nests can be found and slurped up using their extra-long tongue. 

 

This paragraph is about what kinds of foods a sun bear eats, but what important points is the writer making? He eats lots of different things, animals and plants. He also has a long tongue to help him eat some of these things. I can make a topic sentence: Sun bears eat lots of different things, and they can use their tongues to help them get to the trickier foods.

 

6. Now I want you to practice on another paragraph:

 

Because they live in tropical temperatures, sun bears do not need to hibernate and are able to mate at any time of year. Unlike North American bears, male and female sun bears may hang out or live together while raising the cubs.  Sun bears will usually have two cubs at a time and care for them for two years until they are old enough to survive on their own. 

 

What’s this paragraph about? Yes, sun bears. What are the main points the author is making about sun bears? Correct, they do not hibernate and are awake all year round. Yes, another point is that both parents help to raise the cubs. How could we combine those ideas in one sentence beginning: Sun bears…? Sun bears are awake all year round and both parents raise the kids

 

7. Now you are going to finish reading the article and use the questions we ask to help you \ make a topic sentence for each paragraph. When you are finished, you will have made a good summary of the article, which will help you remember important facts about sun bears. Don’t summarize examples or trivia; they are not the important parts of the article. You are writing a short version of the article in your own words, including only the important ideas to remember. And to make sure you remember, we will have a quiz after everyone finishes writing.

 

Assessment: For the assessment I will do two activities. First I will have the students write a paragraph summarizing the article, using their topic sentences they created. To grade it I will use the rubric below to assess the student’s paragraph

 

__ Collected important information 

__ Ignored trivia and examples in summary.

__ Significantly reduced the text from the original

__ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph

__ Sentences organized coherently into essay form.

 

In addition, I have prepared this quiz to give the students, this way the students are assessed in different ways.

 

Quiz:

1. What do sun bears look like?

2. What kinds of food do sun bears eat?

3. What two body parts helps sun bears get their food?

4. How do sun bears avoid attackers?

5. What type of animals might attack sun bears?

6. Where does the Sun bear live?

7. Are sun bears protected from people?

 

 

Reference:

 

Sun bear article: http://www.kidzone.ws/lw/bears/facts-sunbear.htm

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Herrlin, Addie. Do the Polar bear plunge with Summaries: http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/Handoffs.html

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