Swimming with sea turtles through summarization
Rationale- Reading is very important throughout a child’s life. Comprehension is the final step of learning and one of the most important. Being able to comprehend helps students because they can understand what they are reading instead of having to decode the words in front of them. This lesson plan is going to teach the students how to use their comprehension in understanding text and weaving out the important and not important information and then summarizing it. I will start by giving an example of how the students need to summarize their readings.
Materials
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Paper for the students
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Pencils for the students
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Smart board
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Highlighters for students
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Summarize checklist for teachers
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Copies of “National Geographic for Kids: Green Sea Turtle” for each students
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Comprehension questions for assessment
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Rubric
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Procedure
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Say: raise your hand if you have ever read a book that you thought was extremely interesting and had to tell someone about it. Well when you went to tell someone what part of the book did you tell him or her about? You tell them just about the important parts and that is called summarizing. If you can summarize a story then that means that you fully understand what you just read.
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Say: There are guidelines that need to be followed during your summarization. The guidelines are: get rid of the unimportant information, highlight your important information, and make a topic sentence about your most important information.
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Say: I am going to show you how to summarize from the first paragraph of our article. Then you will move on through the article and summarize for yourselves. Please follow along as I read so you know how to do it as well.
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Green sea turtles are the world’s largest species of hard-shelled sea turtle. While most individuals weigh about 300 to 400 pounds (136 to 181 kilograms), some can be as heavy as 440 pounds (204 kilograms).
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Say: Who can give me a summary of what we just read (letting three to five students answer this, and I will write down on the board what they are saying as the summary). Let’s look at it again and highlight the parts that are most important. Highlighting can help you because you will be able to look back and see what is important and then not give as much attention to the other parts.
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Review:
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Say: Now I want you to keep reading about our sea turtle friends. I have given you a pencil and highlighter and want you to go though and highlight what is important and then cross out what is not. The main ideas are going to give you more information about the turtles. There is a lot of different information in the reading but pick the parts that you find most important. For example, their diet, where the live, are the endangered?
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Say: When you have finished reading I want you to go back and look at all you have highlighted. Take your highlighted notes and turn them into about four to six sentences of your summary. It is important that you just use the main ideas and now the details, which you have already crossed out. It is very important that you use your own ideas and not the authors.
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Before you start reading there are a couple of vocabulary words that we should review together so you understand the story. (Project them on the board so they are up when the student are reading)
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Nesting// nest- laying eggs or giving birth. At night turtles nest of the beach.
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Poaching- Hunting or fishing illegally. Many animals have gone extinct because of poaching.
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Endangered- serious risk of extinction. Polar bears are extremely endangered animals.
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When you finish your reading and summarizing please bring it up to me.
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Once the students hand in their summarization, have them answer the comprehension questions. They will be graded on accuracy.
Assessment-
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Where do green sea turtles live?
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Are green sea turtles the smallest or largest turtle in the sea?
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What kind of diet do sea turtles have?
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What are some of the threats that turtles face?
Rubric-
Student name
Date
Student clearly read article all the way through and used information from different paragraphs.
____ / 3
Picked out information using methods taught in class.
_____ / 2
Deleted unimportant details.
_____ / 1
Wrote a short paragraph summarizing most important details from the article.
____ / 4
Total Points and comments:
______ / 10
References:
“Green Sea Turtle”
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/green-sea-turtle/
“Swimming like sharks into summarization” by Sarah Hausler
http://sdh0017.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn
“Summarizing with Sea Turtles” by Rachel Conley
