Rationale: Comprehension and recall skills are very essential elements of a reading program. A skilled reader is never able to recall all of the details of a text, but through the use of summarization strategies the trivial text can be eliminated and the most important information is remembered. The ability to summarize is an especially effective strategy in comprehending texts. This lesson will assist students to summarize and comprehend what they read. Materials: Holt science book; paper; pencils Procedure: 1. Today class we are going to learn how to summarize the things that we read. Summarizing is a kind of strategy that will help you to understand the things that you read like storybooks, magazines, and textbooks. When you summarize you are able to explain in no more than a few sentences what the whole book or article is about. 2. Explain that when you summarize you want to pick out the facts that are important to the text and find the main idea of what you have read. Go over the summarization rules: 1. Find parts of the story that would not affect it if it was left out 2. Get rid of information used more than once 3. Find the important events in the story and use keywords to help you remember them 4. List events in order of which they took place 5. Sum up the story in one topic sentence. 3. Please get out your science books and silently read the short passage from pages 10-15. Do your best to pay attention to the facts that are most important to the passage while you are reading. 4. Tell class: Start by looking for the most important ideas while I read an example passage. Use a sample passage, read it to them, and summarize it out loud for them to hear. Then, by using the text as a guide, I would go back and write down all of the important ideas that I found. 5. A very good strategy for summarizing is writing down, or underlining (if you can) key ideas that really stand out in the passage. Make sure that the key facts are written in chronological order. Go back through the passage and underline (students will use pencils lightly so that they can erase the lines later) key ideas that really stand out. Make sure the information you underline is relevant and not “extra” information. 6. Now that we have learned about summarization lets write about it. Everyone pull out a sheet of paper and write down in three to five sentences (a paragraph) what this passage was about. Please give the paragraph a topic sentence. The topic sentence should be the most important and relevant part of the story. Assessment: Collect their summary to make sure they understand summarization. Also, though it won’t be an assessment, you could look through their books and see what they underlined before they erase it. References: Pressley, M., Johnson, C.J., Symons, S., McGoldrick, J.A., & Kurity, J.A. (1989). Strategies that improve childrens memory and comprehension of text. The Elementary School Journal, 90, 3-32. Holt Science. Rinehart and Winston, Inc. 1989. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/chall/dhendersonrl.html