CTRD Lesson Designs
Summarizing with Sea Otters
Reading to Learn
Rationale: The overall goal of reading is reading comprehension. After fluency has been practiced and achieved, readers can learn how to and work on comprehension. Comprehension is when the student is understanding the material and remembering what they are reading. The students will be able to use superordination. This is when they are able to find an umbrella term for a word.An important part of reading comprehension is getting the overall message of a passage. An important strategy to get to the message is summarization. Summarizing teaches the students how to pick out the important information in the text. Students will be able to omit the unnecessary information from the main ideas. In this lesson, students will learn to summarize a passage by highlighting the important information, crossing out the unnecessary information, and describing the passage in a few sentences.
Materials:
Poster with summarization steps
Poster with paragraph 5 (from article) typed out in big font
Thick Sharpie poster marker & highlighter (for teacher)
Highlighters (one for each student)
Notebook Paper (two pages per student)
Pencils (one per student)
Individual copies of the National Geographic Kids article about sea otters
Summarization checklist (one per student)
Comprehension quiz (one per student)
Procedures:
[Explain why summarization is important.] Say: “When we read a text, we could spend all day trying to remember every detail of that text. Good readers do not try to remember every little detail that they read. Instead, good readers summarize! Summarizing is how we take large selections of text and reduce them to their main ideas. Good readers use summarization strategies to help them remember only the important points the author is trying to make. This helps reduce a text that may have hundreds or thousands of words into a compact theme that is easy to remember."
2. [Hang summarization poster on board & review summarization steps.] Say: “When we summarize, we are going to do three things:
1st: Cross out any unimportant/repeated information, also called fluff, that isn’t essential to the message of the text.
2nd: Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text.
3rd: Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted.”
3. Say: “In a few minutes I’m going to show you how I’d do these steps of summarizing with a paragraph on sea otters, which is the article you are going to be reading today. ‘Book talk’: Is anyone’s favorite animal a sea otter? Do you know what family the sea otter belongs to? Do you know what kind of feet sea otters have? Do you know why sea otters have water-repellent fur? These are some of the questions you will be learning the answers to today as we read the article.”
4. [Teach class about important vocabulary in the passage.] Say: “Another important strategy in reading comprehension is understanding important vocabulary in the passage. We are going to go over a few words together that you will see in the article that we are going to read today. We are also going to learn about umbrella terms. An example of an umbrella term is how a dog is also an animal.” [For each word: explain the word in simple language, model how to use the word (What does it mean? What doesn’t it mean?), provide sample questions using the word, and scaffold by making a sentence using the word for students to complete.]
Words: Water-repellant, Extinction, Carnivore
Example: Say: “Carnivore: One of the words in our passage is carnivore; let’s look at what it means.
1. A carnivore is an animal that feeds on other animals.
2. Carnivores eat meat, but if an animal were to not eat meat it would be a herbivore. Therefore, carnivores are also called meat-eaters.
3. Which of these is an example of a carnivore: a lion or a deer?
4. Predators are called carnivores because… (they hunt/kill their own prey and eat only meat)
5. [Hang poster with paragraph 5 on it beside poster with summarization rules. Teacher needs thick sharpie and highlighter. Pass out the sea otter article to each student along with a highlighter and a pencil.]
Say: “Here is a paragraph from our article. I am going to show you how I summarize this paragraph and you can follow along and do it with me on your paper. First let’s go back over our summarization steps.
1st: Cross out any unimportant or repeated information, also called fluff, that isn’t essential to the message of the text.
2nd: Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text.
3rd: Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted.”
First, I need to cross out any unimportant or repeated information. I can cross out sentence 1 because sentence 1 isn’t important to the main idea of the paragraph. Next, I need to highlight the important information. I think that sentences 2 and 3 are important to the paragraph so I am going to highlight both sentences.
“Sea otters wash themselves after a meal, cleaning their coat with their teeth and paws. They need to keep their fur coat clean, so it stays waterproof. Sea otters have thick underfur that traps air to form an insulating layer against chilly waters (they have no insulating fat).”
Lastly, I am going to form a topic sentence from my highlighted information. By looking at my highlighted information I can come up with this as my topic sentence [write topic sentence below the paragraph on poster so students can see]: “Sea otters have water-repellent fur to insulate their bodies from the chill waters.”
6. Say: “Now I want you to use the summarization rules we discussed on a paragraph.”
“While floating on their backs, sea otters not only nap, but also use rocks to help them open mussels or other shellfish. Otters place a rock on their chests and smash the shellfish against it until it breaks open to reveal the tasty meat inside. They also snack on such aquatic creatures as sea urchins, crabs, squid, octopuses, and fish.”
Say: “What unimportant information can we cross out? Yes, we can cross out the third sentence. So, what are we left with? Right, we are left with sentences one and two. Let’s read these sentences and see if we can combine them into one sentence to create a topic sentence. We can combine our sentences to make the topic sentence: “Sea otters float on their backs and use rocks to crack open mussels and other shellfish to reveal the tasty meat inside.”
7. [Pass out 2 pieces of paper to each student for them to write their topic sentences on.] Say: “Now I’d like you to finish reading the article and use your summarizing rules to make a topic sentence for each paragraph. When you are finished, you will have a good summary of the article. This will help you remember important facts about sea otters. Don’t summarize the unimportant or repeated information. This ‘fluff’ is only written to help you understand the main ideas. When you summarize you are writing a short version of the article in your own words while including only the important information. We will have a short quiz after everyone finishes their topic sentences.”
8. Assessment: [Collect each student’s summary of the article and evaluate the summarization using the following checklist:]
______ 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
9. Quiz: [Pass out a quiz to each student.]
1. What family are sea otters in? (Weasel family)
2. Where do sea otters like to float? (Water’s surface in forests of kelp or giant seaweed)
3. What do sea otters eat? (Mussels, shellfish, sea urchins, crabs, squid, octopuses, and fish)
4. Why do sea otters need to keep their coat clean? (So it will stay waterproof)
5. Sea otters are found along what coasts? (Pacific Ocean in North America and Asia)
References:
Sea Otter Text:
Sarah Kowal, “Summarizing with Sea Turtles”
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