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Summarization with Penguins  

Reading to Learn 

By: Alana Aplin 

 

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Rationale: Reading is the first, and most crucial step in learning. For students to comprehend long texts, students must practice their ability to summarize long texts. When reading, it is important for students to be able to differentiate between important and unimportant information so that they can recall the main ideas of a passage. This lesson will teach students how to pick out the valuable information in a long text, summarize the text, and then demonstrate their understanding of the whole text. 


 

Materials:

  • Pencil, marker, and highlighter for each student

  • Blank sheet of paper for each student

  • “Emperor Penguin” National Geographic Kids article for each student

  • Whiteboard

  • Comprehension Questions written on board

  • Assessment Checklist for each student (filled out by teacher) - attached at bottom 


 

Procedures:

  • Say: Have you ever read a book and really wanted to tell your friend about it, but you didn’t want to read them the entire book? What did you do? [Allow students to respond] You only told them the main ideas, right? You couldn’t tell them every part of the story, so you just told them the important parts. Does anybody know what that’s called? [Allow students to respond] It’s called summarization! Summarizing books and stories is very helpful when we just want to give someone a brief idea of what we just read. It also helps you as the reader to understand what you just read! Today we’re going to read an article about penguins and practice our summarization skills!

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  • Say: Before we start reading our article, let’s see what we already know about penguins. Does anybody know any cool facts about penguins? [Allows children to respond; as students respond, record their responses on board in front of classroom] Penguins are the only animals to live on the ice during the Arctic winter. It gets super cold there. How do you think they survive? Let's read and find out!

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  • [Hand out blank sheet of paper to each student] Say: Everyone take out a marker. We’re going to write down the 3 rules of summarization. Turn your paper horizontally and make 3 columns. At the top, write “3 Rules of Summarization”. [Do this step as the students do it so they can visualize] Once you’re finished, look up at the board so we can start going over the 3 rules together [wait for all students to finish]. Our first rule is “delete”. Write, “Delete” at the top of your first column. [Write “Delete” at the top of first column] What do you think we mean by delete? [Allow students to respond] When we’re summarizing a story or article, we want to get rid of or delete the information that isn’t important. We need to decide which parts are important, and cross out ones that aren’t. When you’re reading a book, you’ll have to mentally “cross out” the unimportant words. But today when we read our article you’ll be able to cross them out with your marker! I’m going to write the steps on the board, but I want you to leave your chart blank so that you can use it when you read our article today. [Write explanation of the “delete” step in the first column] Our second rule of summarization is “substitute”. Write “Substitute” at the top of the middle column. [Write “Substitute” at the top of the middle column] What do you think we mean by substitute? [Allow students to respond] After we have deleted the unnecessary information and found the parts that we think are important, we want to shorten it a little bit. We’re going to substitute long parts into shorter parts. Say we had a sentence that was talking about “apples, oranges, and bananas”. How could we group all those words into one word? [Allow students to respond] We can use the word fruits, because apples, oranges, and bananas are all fruits! By doing this, we are shortening our summary while keeping the important ideas. [Write explanation of the “substitute” step in the middle column] Our third and last rule of summarization is “create”. Write “Create” at the top of your third column. What do you think we mean by create? [Allow students to respond] Once we get rid of the unimportant information and pick out the parts that are important, we need to create main idea sentences. While reading our article today, we’re going to create a main idea sentence for each paragraph.

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  • Say: I’m going to help you summarize the first paragraph and then you’ll do the rest by yourselves. So first we’re going to read the paragraph one time to figure out what it’s about. [Read out loud with article on projector/overhead and have students follow along on their own sheet] Now that we’ve finished reading, we’re going to follow our steps of summarization. First, we need to delete the information that is not important by crossing it out and highlight the information that is important: Emperor penguins spend their entire lives on Antarctic ice and in its waters. That seems important, right? So, let’s highlight just the end of that sentence. We know that we’re talking about emperor penguins, so we don’t need to highlight that. They survive – breeding, raising young, and eating – by relying on several clever adaptations. Since we are going to learn about the clever adaptions later in the article, we only need to know that they survive by breeding, raising young, and eating. So, what should our main idea sentence be for this paragraph? [Allow time for student response] I’m going to write our main sentence on the board: “Emperor penguins breed, raise their young, and eat in Antarctica.” I want everyone to copy that and put it in his or her “Create” column of the summarization chart. Label it number one. You will write a main idea sentence for each paragraph in the article.

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  • Say: Before we read our article, we need to go over some important vocabulary that we might not already know. What does the word regurgitate mean? [Allow time for student’s response] Regurgitate means to bring already swallowed food up again to the mouth. Birds regurgitate their food to feed their babies. [Write word and definition on board so students can reference as needed]

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  • Say: Okay now I want everyone to read the article silently to themselves, cross off the unimportant information, highlight the essential information, and create main idea sentences for each paragraph! I’ll be walking around to make sure that you’re working and see if you need any help. Once you’re done, come hand your chart and article to me and I will give you some questions to answer.

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  • [Hand out comprehension question worksheet as students finish summarizing; as they turn in their chart and article, fill out the assessment checklist for each student to assess their summarization skills] – 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?

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Assessment Checklist

1. Did the student fill out the summarization chart on his/her paper?

2. Did the student create a topic sentence for the second, third, and fourth paragraph?

3. Did the student successfully delete unimportant information?

4. Did the student successfully identify important information?

5. Did the student use the important information to create topic sentences?

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Resources:

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