Diving into Summaries with the Emperor Penguin
Reading to Learn Lesson Design
Rationale:
Once students have grown in fluency, they must learn to comprehend what they read. Reading is the first major step in learning, and this comes from comprehending texts. To comprehend long texts, students need to practice their ability to summarize what they read. It is crucial that students are able to differentiate between information that is important and information that is unimportant; this will help them recall the main ideas from the text. This lesson is designed to teach students how to identify important information in a long text, summarize the text, and demonstrate understanding of the text as a whole.
Materials:
Pencil, marker, and highlighter for each student
Blank sheet of paper for each student
“Emperor Penguin” National Geographic Kids article for each student
White board
Projector
Comprehension Questions (written on board)
Assessment Checklist for each student (filled out by teacher)- attached at end of Lesson Design
Procedures:
Say: “Have you ever read a really great book and wanted to tell someone about it, but you didn’t want to read them the entire book? What did you do instead?” (Allow for response). “You only told them the main ideas, or the most important parts, right? There is another word for when we do this; does anyone know what that word is?” (Allow for response). “It’s called summarization! Summarizing stories is extremely helpful when we don’t want to share a whole text, but rather just want to give someone a brief idea of what we read and learned. It can also help you as the reader to better understand what you have just read! Today, we will read an article about Emperor Penguins and practice giving summaries.”
(Hand out blank pieces of paper to each student). Say: “Everyone take out a marker. We’re going to write down the three rules of summarization on your paper. Turn your paper horizontally and draw three columns. Label your paper ‘Three Rules of Summarization’ so that you will have them from now on.” (Demonstrate these steps while students do them so that they can see an example). “When you finish, please look at the board so that we can talk about the three rules together.” (Wait for all students to finish). “Ok, our first rule is ‘delete.’ Write ‘Delete’ at the top of the first column. What do we mean by ‘delete’?” (Allow for response). “When we summarize a text, we want to get rid of or ‘delete’ any information that is not important to our understanding of what we read. We must decide what is important and cross out anything that isn’t. Whenever you read a book, you will need to mentally ‘cross out’ anything that is not important, but today you can use your marker in the article! I will write out the steps on the board, but leave your charts blank for now so that you can use them when you read the article.” (Write explanation of the ‘delete’ step on the board). “The second rule of summarization is ‘substitute.’ Write ‘Substitute’ at the top of the middle column. What do we mean by substitute?” (Allow for response). “Once we get rid of anything unnecessary in the text and find what is important, we want to shorten the information we kept. We will substitute long parts with shorter versions of the same information. For example, if we had a sentence that talked about monkeys, elephants, and giraffes, how could we use just one word to shorten the sentence?” (Allow for response). “We could use the word animals, since monkeys, elephants, and giraffes are all animals! By doing this, we gave a shorter summary but still kept the main idea of the sentence.” (Write explanation of ‘substitute’ on the board). “The final rule of summarization is ‘create.’ Write ‘Create’ at the top of the third column. What does ‘create’ mean here? (Allow for response). “After we get rid of unimportant information and narrow down the important information, we must create main idea sentences. While we read our article today, we will create one main idea sentence for each paragraph we read.”
Say: “Before we jump into reading our article, let’s talk about what we already know about penguins. Can anyone share something cool they know about penguins?” (Allow for response, and record responses on the board). “Here’s a fact for you: penguins are the only animals to live on the ice during the Arctic winter. It gets very cold there- way too cold for most animals! How do you think penguins survive? Let’s read our article to find out!”
Say: “I will help you summarize the first paragraph, but you will do the rest by yourselves! First, let’s read the paragraph one time through to figure out what it’s about.” Emperor penguins spend their entire lives on Antarctic ice and in its waters. They survive—breeding, raising young, and eating—by relying on a number of clever adaptations. (Read the first paragraph- in bold-out loud while showing it on the projector and have students follow along on their sheets). “Now that we have read the paragraph, we will follow our steps of summarization. First, let’s delete any information that is not important by crossing it out. Also, go ahead and highlight information that you know is important. ‘Emperor penguins spend their entire lives on Antarctic ice and in its waters.’ That sounds like it could be important, right? Let’s highlight that sentence. However, we know that we are talking about emperor penguins, so we really don’t need to highlight those two words. Let’s look to the next sentence ‘They survive- breeding, raising young, and eating- by relying on a number of clever adaptations.’ Since we will learn about clever adaptations in the article, we only need to highlight that they survive by breeding, raising young, and eating. What should our main idea sentence be for this paragraph?” (Allow for response). “I’ll write our main idea sentence on the board: ‘Emperor penguins live in Antarctica, where they breed, raise their young, and eat.’ Everyone copy this sentence into your ‘create’ column on your chart. Label it number one since it is the first paragraph. You will do the same for every other paragraph as well.”
Say: “Before we read the article, we must go over some vocabulary words in the text that we might not know. What does the word ‘regurgitate’ mean?” (Allow for response). “Regurgitate means to bring food that has already been swallowed back up to the mouth again. This is how birds feed their babies!” (Write word and definition on the board for reference). “Do people regurgitate to feed babies?” (Allow for response). “No, we don’t. But some animals, mostly birds, will! So fill in the blank… Baby penguins get their nutrients from food that their mothers _____________.” (Allow for response). “If you get stuck on another word, see if you can determine the meaning from the context, but if you still need help, raise your hand and I will come to you as soon as possible.”
Say: “Now everyone read the article silently to themselves. Remember to cross off unimportant information, highlight important information, and create a main idea sentence for each paragraph. I will walk around to make sure everyone is doing ok. When you finish, turn in your chart and article to me, and I will give you some questions to answer.”
As each student turns in their work, hand them a comprehension question worksheet. Also, use the checklist attached below to assess the work each student turns in.
Comprehension Questions:
1. Where do Emperor penguins live?
2. When do Emperor penguins breed?
3. What is the average life-span of an Emperor penguin?
4. Why do mothers leave their eggs with the father?
5. How do penguins feed their babies?
Resources:
“Emperor Penguin” (National Geographic Kids article), http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/content/kids/en_US/animals/emperor-penguin/#emperor-penguin-%20group-snow.jpg
Rules for Summarization by Carol Hryniuk-Adamov, https://www.winnipegsd.ca/schools/Kelvin/StudentResources/khslibrary/Documents/Rules%20for%20Summarization.pdf
Sara Price, “Diving into Summarization,” http://sarahpricelessondesigns.weebly.com/reading-to-learn.html
http://www.amazing-animations.com/animations/penguin2.gif
