Reading to Learn Design 

Let’s Make a Summary Sandwich!

 

Rationale: The goal of reading is to understand and comprehend what we have read. After fluency has been practiced and reached, readers can then aim to learn how to work on comprehending what they read. How well a student understand what they read and what they learn from the text will represent a student’s comprehension. To help readers learn more about the text summarization can be used. This allows students to choose to most important details from a text and not focusing so much on minor details. One way to help teach students to summarize is by taking notes. This lesson will help students learn how to find the main ideas in a text, construct a meaning from what they read, and ultimately summarize the text.

 

Materials:

• Paper, pencil, and summary sandwich sheet (attached below), and copies or eBooks of Carla’s Sandwich by: Debbie Herman

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

• Bookmark strips (construction paper) for summarization rules:

1. Read the text

2. Decide what sentences from the text are most important that help say the main idea and write in on sandwich sheet.

3. Highlight the important information and take out minor details

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

5. Write a summary sentence that explains what the text is about and fill in main ideas from beginning and end of text as well as IMPORTANT details in the middle.

• 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 a story. When we read the 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. For the story we are going to complete a summary sandwich.

 

2.  Say: “now we are going so learn the rules of summarizing. (Pass out book-mark sized paper) I am going to write down some important rules on how to summarize and I want you to copy it on the piece of paper I just handed out. We will use this as quick guide to summarizing and you can use it later as a referral piece.

 

3. (Say and write down these steps)

• We are going to read the whole text

• We are going to decide the most important parts of the text from the beginning, middle, and end.

• Use a highlighter to mark important things but not the minor details (helpful tip is that you should not highlight that many things)

• Find one term or word from each paragraph to be the umbrella term for that part

• Write a short summary on the summary sandwich sheet to help explain the text. Once you finish this sheet write a 1-2 sentence summary on the back about the text.

4. Say: “Now I am going to have all of you read the story Carla’s Sandwich (project e-book on board if possible and do not have paper copies). Have you ever brought something weird to eat for lunch at school? Have you ever eaten a really crazy food? Carla loves to bring stinky and weird foods to school; let’s read the book to see what happens.”

5. Read the first few pages together and model the summarizing instructions that are on the newly made book-marks 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 I want you all to read the rest of the story and try to fill out your summary sandwiches.”

7. Have each individual complete their sandwich sheet on their own and take them up for assessment.

8. Once all sheets are taken up do a summary sandwich as a class collaboratively.

9. Ask some comprehensive questions about the text to check for understanding examples include:

 

• Why did people make fun of Carla?

• Give an example of a type of food Carla brought to school?

• Who did Carla share a sandwich with?

• What type of sandwich did she have at the end of the book?

Assessment:

Have Students complete this sheet and write summary on the back