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Reading to Learn: The Fabled Summary

Rationale: Summarization is valuable for readers to be able to grasp the main ideas of a text without getting bogged down and overwhelmed by details. Mastery of this skill can lead to more thorough comprehension of texts. Students will learn about the about-point technique through modeling and then trying themselves by reading a brief expository text, summarizing it with the about-point method, and then answering comprehension questions for assessment.

 

Materials:

Print outs of the expository text for the classroom

Print outs of the comprehension questions for the classroom

Pencils for the classroom

 

Procedure:

  1. “Have you ever read something and then tried to tell someone about it but couldn’t remember all the little details? What if I told you that that’s ok, and sometimes even a good thing! Many times, when we read about something, we will remember and understand it better if we recall only the main ideas in what we just read instead of trying to remember every little detail. The main ideas are the most important things the reading talked about.”

  2. “That leads us into our strategy we can use to summarize what we read. It’s called about-point. It’s very simple, we read something and then ask: ‘What was it about? What was the point?’ The first question reminds me of how we just talked about what the main ideas of a passage are. They are the most important things you learned from reading it, and they are usually good ways to answer what the passage is about. The second question, ‘What was the point?’ is asking what the author wanted us to learn from reading what they wrote. Maybe we could think of ways we could use what we learned in real life as our answer to this question.”

  3. “Today we are going to read a passage about fables to practice summarizing by using the about-point trick. Do you know what a fable is? A fable is a short story, usually about animals, that teaches us a lesson about how to be a good person. This means it has a moral. Moral means an understanding of what is right and wrong. So when we say a fable has a moral, we are saying that it has an understanding of what’s right to do and what isn’t and it’s passing that understanding on to us through a fun story!”

  4. “Now I’m going to show you how I would use the about point strategy on part of our passage. First I’m going to read: ‘A fable is a story. A wise author would write the fable to tell a lesson. Long ago, people wrote many fables. They wrote them to help other people learn. For example, the tortoise and the hare is a fable. That fable tells people it is not wise to show off. It is wise to work hard.’ Now that I’ve read, I’m first going to ask: what was it about? Well, it was about fables! Fables are stories that people wrote long ago to teach lessons to others. Now we can ask what was the point? The point could be that fables can be used to teach others important morals, like how important it is to work hard.”

  5. Now that you’ve seen how I summarized a small part of our passage, I want you all to read the rest of it, quietly to yourselves, and try using the about-point method on your own to summarize what you read to a partner. Then I’ll give you a few questions about the passage so we can see if summarizing helped you to remember more!

  6. Questions:

  1. What kind of characters do fables usually have? What is special about them?

  2. What is a moral? Can you think of an example of a moral?

  3. Why did the crow lose his fruit?

  4. Why didn’t the grasshopper have anywhere to stay during the winter?

  5. Who helped the grasshopper?

 

References:

Learn About Fables https://teacher.depaul.edu/Documents/ReadtoLearnaboutFablesGrades3-4.pdf

Roaring Into Summarization by Anna Bolton https://abolt833.wixsite.com/lessondesigns/reading-to-learn

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