A Reading to Learn Lesson Design

By: Allie Harmon

 

 

Rationale:

Once your students have gained the ability to read fluidly and accurately, they must learn the lifelong skill of reading in order to learn information. The main goal of reading to learn is reading comprehension; in other words, the student should begin to understand the meaning of the text. This lesson hones in on reading comprehension using the method of summarizing, or removing trivial information.  This allows the student to glean what is necessary from the text.

 

Materials:

• Print Ten Freaky Forces of Nature for each student and myself

• Smart Board

• Ipads (4) with volcano video minimized

• Assessment Questions (Y/N)

  • Did the student get rid of the unimportant information?

  • Did the student get rid of repeated information?

  • Did the student underline the important information?

  • Did the student come up with a topic sentence?

• Reading Comprehension Questions typed.

  • "The fastest wind speed ever recorded—318 miles an hour (511 kilometers an hour)—occurred during a tornado near Oklahoma City in 1999."

  • "A tornado with wind speeds of 70 miles an hour (113 kilometers an hour) can sweep away entire houses and hurl cars through the air like missiles."

  • "But a tornado with wind speeds of more than 300 miles an hour (483 kilometers an hour) has the power to derail trains and cars, tear grass from the ground, and even rip pavement from the street."

 

Procedure: 

Say: Hello class! Today, we are going to learn a new way to understand the meaning of the words we are now able to read! Who knows the big word that means understanding the meaning of the reading? <Call on someone>. That’s right! It is called reading COMPREHENSION. The tool I am going to give you to learn how to comprehend a text is called summarization. Summarization is taking a whole passage and picking out the key parts and combining them into a shorter paragraph. We use summaries every day, which is why they are so important. If your friend asks you about a trip, you cannot tell him every detail, so you just tell him the most memorable parts. That is a way to summarize. 

 

Say: Someone raise their hand and tell me what we just learned about in geography. <Call on someone>. That’s right! Forces of nature! Now call out some different forces of nature. That’s right: tornadoes hail stones, and volcanoes, to name a few. What are some of those new words we have been learning about forces of nature? Listen to this sentence: “the volcano erupted, spewing molten lava all over the surrounding countryside”. ‘I am not sure I remember what the words erupt, spew, and molten mean. I remember Ms. Harmon telling me that crowds AND volcanoes can erupt... Oh yeah! I remember erupt means to explode, or suddenly release. ‘ Also, class, remember that spewing is similar to spitting. So imagine a mountain spitting out lava. What kind of lava? Oh yeah, molten. Which means extremely hot. 

 

Say: So we have the new vocabulary down. Let’s talk about summarizing. There are a few little rules to summarizing. Get out a piece of paper and pencil and write down each rule as I say it. Rule #1: Get rid of (or delete) unimportant or repeated information. <Allow time to write>. This means that if you can tell the piece of information is not very important to the text, you can get rid of it by putting an “x” over it, or putting a mental (pretend) “x” over it if you cannot mark the text you are working on. Rule #2: Find the important information. <Allow time to write>. So if you see something that does look important, write it down, or underline it. Finally,  Rule #3: Write a topic sentence <Allow time to write>. We will practice this a lot, but all that means is that you write down all the MOST important parts of the text in one sentence.

 

<Pass out copies of Ten Freaky Forces of Nature and display the article on the Smart Board. Discuss the article, sparking the students’ interest.>

 

Say: This article delves into the mystery and majesty of different forces of nature. It is hard to imagine, but things like volcanoes that explode hot matter from inside the earth’s core, and storms that rip up huge buildings, and waves that can wipe out established cities, all exist in our world. Lets keep reading and discover more of these crazy forces of nature.

 

Listen: The fastest wind speed ever recorded—318 miles an hour (511 kilometers an hour)—occurred during a tornado near Oklahoma City in 1999. Scientists classify tornadoes by the damage they can do. A tornado with wind speeds of 70 miles an hour (113 kilometers an hour) can sweep away entire houses and hurl cars through the air like missiles. But a tornado with wind speeds of more than 300 miles an hour (483 kilometers an hour) has the power to derail trains and cars, tear grass from the ground, and even rip pavement from the street.

 

Say: Follow along with me as I follow the rules of summarization as applied to this passage. The first sentence says: ‘The fastest wind speed ever recorded – 318 miles an hour (511 kilometers an hour)—occurred during a tornado near Oklahoma City in 1999.’ I ask myself, is it important to know that? Yes, but lets go on to read the rest of the paragraph to understand the MOST important parts of what is being said. Ok, moving on. “Scientists classify tornadoes by the damage they can do”. That whole sentence seems to be important to the text, so we will underline it.

 

Say: Moving on: “A tornado with the wind speeds of 70 miles an hour (113 kilometers an hour) through the air like missiles”. I will underline sweep away entire houses and hurl cars’ to emphasize damage tornadoes can have and put an ‘x’ over the rest. <Wait for students to mark.“But a tornado with wind speeds of more than 300 miles an hour (483 kilometers an hour) has the power to derail trains and cars, tear grass from the ground, and even rip pavement from the street.” I will also underline “has the power to derail trains and cars, tear grass from the ground, and even rip pavement from the street” because it further discusses the damage, marking out what is left. <Wait for students to mark>. So the most important parts have to do with the damage that winds create. I will go back and strike through hat first sentence, because it is not the MOST important information.

 

Say: I have demonstrated rules #1 and #2, so now we will do rule #3 and create a topic sentence. I will look back at the parts I underlined. I have, “Scientists classify tornadoes by the damage they can do and I have that 70 miles per hour winds can sweep away entire houses and hurl cars and 300 miles and hour winds derail trains and cars, tear grass from the ground, and even rip pavement from the streets’. Now I need to make a sentence that makes sense from that. I will say, “Scientists classify tornadoes by the damage they can do, including sweeping away entire house, derailing trains, and even ripping up pavement from the streets, to name a few.” Those are the most important parts of the text, so that is my topic sentence.

 

Say: Does anyone have questions? Who understands? Show me thumbs if you understand. Excellent! You now have the tools to excel in the lifelong skill of READING TO LEARN! 

 

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References:

 

Volcano Video

 

Casey Gaines, Super Summarizers

http://www.auburn.edu/%7Ecng0007/gainesrl.htm