Summarizing with Beluga Whales

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Rationale: Once students can read fluently the next step to comprehension is summarizing. Being able to summarize means that you can point out the key points and main ideas in a text. It is a crucial skill for students who are learning to read to also understand how to summarize. It is important to focus only on the key points and not give too much detail when summarizing. The objective of this lesson is to help children distinguish what information is important and what is less significant, be able to understand what they are reading, and summarize the text. 

 

 Materials:

• Pencils

• Paper

• Summarization checklist

• Comprehension quiz

• A copy of Beluga Whale article for each student

•  White board and dry erase marker 

 

 Procedures: 

 

• Say: “Summarizing is when you recall the important and key parts of a text. Sometimes it can be hard to remember everything that happens in a story, so we summarize to help us remember the important parts. It can also be hard to pick out the key parts and leave out unneeded details. As we learn more about how to summarize and what strategies we will learn about the about-point method. Today we are going to read an article about Beluga whales and learn how to summarize this passage.”

 

• Say: “There are many methods you can use to help become better at summarizing, today we are going to learn about the about-point method. When using this strategy, the reader asks themselves two questions: What is the text about? What is the main point the writer is trying to make? These questions are important to ask yourself while reading so you can pick out the important parts of the text. The second question is more complex and you will need to combine all the important and key parts together.” 

 

• Say: “Before I start passing out the articles, does anyone know anything about Beluga whales?” (Allow time for students to respond) That’s right, Beluga whales are whales found in the Arctic ocean! Now let’s look at some vocabulary words. The first word is Pods. Does anyone know what a pod is? (allow time for students to answer) Yes, it is the group that the whales travel in! Our next word is echolocation, does anyone know what this means? Echolocation is used as a means for hunting, echolocation uses reverberating sounds to distinguish an object's location, size, and shape. Our last vocabulary word is endangered. Has anyone ever heard of this word or know what it means? (give students time to respond) For an animal to be endangered means it is at a serious risk of extinction. Great! That is all our vocabulary words. I want you to try and remember these when reading the article to help you better understand.``

 

• Pass out the articles and the vocabulary sheets to each student. Say: “Now that you have received your article, I am going to start reading aloud and I want you to follow along. Now that we are done reading, what do we need to do? (allow time for answers) Correct! We need to pick out the important information. Let’s see what you think is important. The article says, ‘Beluga whales live in the Arctic Ocean’. Do you think we should keep this? Yes, we should! Should we keep, ‘Beluga whales can eat octopus, squid, crabs, shrimp, clams, snails, and sandworms. Sometimes the shrimp will be in a school and there can be hundreds of them.’ (allow time for answers). This is where it gets tricky! We need to go through this sentence and get rid of the information we don’t need. So instead of leaving the full sentence we can say Beluga whales have a large diet consisting of octopus, squid, crabs, shrimp, clams, snails, and sandworms. Awesome job everyone!”

 

• Say: “Now that we have worked on summarization together, I want you to try by yourself. I want you to try the about-point strategy in this article. I want you to take your paper and pencil and answer two questions. (Write the two questions on the board) If you can’t remember them, refer to the white board. Ok, everyone get started!” 

 

• Say: “Great! Now that everyone is done, we are going to take a comprehension quiz. This is going to see if you could remember the important parts of the article. After we finish the quiz we will have an assessment.” 

 

Comprehension questions: 

1. What is the name of a group of Beluga whales?

2. What does a Beluga whale’s diet consist of?

3. What is echolocation?

4. What ocean does the Beluga whale live in?

 

Assessment: 

Collect each student’s summary of the article, and evaluate their summarization. 

 

____ Reduced text from the original 

____ Important information is included 

____ Organized summary into a paragraph 

____ Ignored less significant information

____ Contained ideas from each paragraph  

 

Resources: 

• “Beluga Whales” article 

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/beluga-whale

• “Swinging into Summarization” (Reading to Learn Lesson)

https://lauravlsims.wixsite.com/mssimsreadinglessons/reading-to-learn