Reading with Ms. Floyd 

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 because it would take too long 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 sloths and practice our summarization skills!

Say: We are about to read this article to learn about sloths, but before we do that lets talk about them! Does anybody know any cool facts about sloths? [Allows children to respond; as students respond, record their responses on board in front of classroom] Sloths seem clumsy and slow because they are on land, but they are actually great swimmers! Did you know that sloths only have to go to the bathroom once a week? Isn’t that crazy? There are a lot of crazy things that you may not know about sloths, so lets read this article to find out what else we don’t know about sloths.

[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]

Say: 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 of 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 still keeping the important ideas. [Write explanation of the “substitute” step in the middle column]

Say: 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.

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: “It's a good thing sloths don't have to go to school. They'd never make it on time.” This first sentence is fun to read, but it doesn’t tell us anything about sloths so we can cross it out because we didn’t learn anything.  “These drowsy tree-dwellers sleep up to 20 hours a day!” There are two important things that we learn in this sentence, so what do you think we will highlight? (Allow students to respond). That’s right! Sloths are tree-dwellers and they sleep up to 20 hours a day so both of those things should be highlighted. “And even when they are awake, they barely move at all.” This tells us about what the sloth does during the day. That seems important right? So lets highlight that they barely move at all. “In fact, they're so incredibly sluggish, algae actually grows on their fur.” We already know that they are sluggish because we know that they sleep most of the day so we can cross out the first half of the sentence; however, we learn in this sentence that algae grows on the fur, so we can highlight that part of the sentence.

Say: 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: “These drowsy tree-dwellers sleep up to 20 hours a day!” 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.

Say: Before we read our article, we need to go over some important vocabulary that we might not already know. What does the word drowsy mean? [Allow time for students response] Drowsy means sleepy, so even when the sloth is awake, they are still tired and moving like they are half asleep. [Write word and definition on board so students can reference as needed]. For example, when I go to bed really late, I am drowsy at school in the morning. When do you feel more drowsy during the day? (allow students to answer). I feel more drowsy in the afternoon after I eat because I am tired. Now I want you to complete this sentence: You can tell when I am drowsy by the way that I... (squint my eyes, yawn, etc.) 

Say: Okay now I want everyone to read the article silently to themselves, cross off the unimportant information, highlight the important 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.

[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 Sloths live? 2) What do we use to identify which type of sloth we are looking at? 3) What grows on the sloths’ skin? 4) How does this thing that grows help the sloth?