Reading to Learn

Blown Away with Reading

Rationale: the goal of reading is comprehending what has been read. After fluency has been practiced and achieved, readers can learn how to and work on comprehension. Comprehensive reading is how well the student is understanding and remembering what they are reading. Comprehensive reading allows students to learn from what they are reading. In order to be able to read to learn, students must be able to master summarization of texts. Summarizing teaches students how to pick the most important information in the text while not focusing on minor details. The way to teach Summarization and comprehension skills is to take notes. By taking notes, students learn how to omit unnecessary and focus on the main ideas and major points of the text. This lesson will help students to learn how to find the main ideas in a text, construct meaning from the text, and summarize the text.

Materials:

- Paper, pencil, highlighter for every student

- Summarization checklist (write on the board for students to put on book mark)

- Bookmark strips (construction paper) for summarization rules:

- Read the text- Decide what sentences from the text are most important that help say the main idea

- Highlight the important information and take out minor details

- Find and umbrella term for everything that happens in the paragraph by using highlighted sentences.

-. Write a summary sentence that explains what the text is about

- “Hot Air Balloons” article

- Summarization grading rubric (under assessment)

- Comprehension questions

Procedures:

1. Say: “today we are going to learn how to summarize a story. Summarizing is when we read a text and we say what important things happened. We are going to practice how to summarize by reading two stories. When we read each story we are going to determine what the main idea is, what supports the main idea, and what details we can leave out of our summary.

2. Say: “now we are going so learn the rules of summarizing. (Pass out book mark sized paper) I am going to write down how to summarize on the board and I want you to copy it on the piece of paper I just handed out. We will use this as a book mark so that you all can refer back to it on how to summarize.

3. (Say and write down these steps): “Step one we are going to read the text. Step two is that we are going to decide what sentences from the text are most important (the ones that express key information and main ideas). Step three is to highlight the important information and omit the minor details. Step four is find and umbrella term for everything that happens in the paragraph by using highlighted sentences. Step five is write a summary sentence that explains what the text is about.

4. Say: “Now I am going to give you all the article “Hot Air Balloons” to read (pass out a copy of the passage for each student to read and highlight). Have you ever seen a hot air balloon? What do you know about them? We do not really see hot air balloons on a daily basis. But there are really cool festivals with hundreds of colorful hot air balloons. We are going to read an article that talks about the history of the hot air balloon and the festivals!”

5. Read the first section together labeled “History” Model the summarizing instructions that are on the newly made bookmarks by asking the class If each sentence is important or not. If they say yes and they are correct, highlight with the students. If they say no and they are correct, move pass the sentence without highlighting. Model how to write a summary of the passage for the class with the information that was highlighted as a class.

6. Say: “now students, I want you to read and highlight the important information in the rest of the article and write a one sentence summary for each section. Then write a three-five sentence summary over the entire article.”

7. After all the students have finished, go over what should have been highlighted and why and then ask students to read their summaries to the class. Allow time for students to fix their summaries and then take them up for assessment.

8. Now we are going to review vocabulary. We are going to talk about the word "signaling" from your text. Signaling is when you or something notifies someone else about a certain matter. So, you could say, "She was signaling the airplane to back up," or you could say, "The red light was signaling the car to stop." So class, what would you do if you wanted someone to stop before running into a pole.” (answer: signal them) Now class, see if you can fill in the blank in this sentence. "There was a police officer _________________ when the kids could cross the street." (answer: signaling)

9. Ask the class comprehension questions about the passages and have them write down the answer on a sheet of paper. Say: “What is a hot air balloon? How is the air heated? Who invented it? Who were the first passengers on a hot air balloon? What is a hot air balloon festival? What shape is a hot air balloon normally?”

Assessment:

§ Questions to ask aloud and have students wri

te down the answer to test comprehension:

What is a hot air balloon?
How is the air heated?
Who invented it?
Who were the first passengers on a hot air balloon?
What is a hot air balloon festival?
What shape is a hot air balloon normally?

§ Reading summary activity rubric:

In his/her summary, did the student…
Delete insignificant information and highlighted the important information? YES / NO
Write the main idea of the article? YES / NO
Write 3-5 good, concise sentences? YES / NO
Select the key points from the article? YES / NO
Chose the correct main idea for this article? YES / NO

References:

Emme Levins, Reading is Cool

https://sites.google.com/view/ctrdlessondesigns/reading-to-learn?authuser=1

Link to “Hot Air Balloons”

https://kids.kiddle.co/Hot_air_balloon

Communications - Lesson Designs