Rationale: Once students have picked up on fluency and can read text without needing to slowly, and laboriously decode each word in a text, students can begin to read to get the message of the text, also known as, reading comprehension. Reading for comprehension is the most important skill that readers can take away from their reading experience. This lesson is designed to show children the joys of reading fluently, and also to teach the most important reading comprehension skill, summarization. After this lesson, students should be able to comprehend the texts that they are reading after one to two read throughs and demonstrate their comprehension skills by answering in-depth questions on their reading. In this lesson, students will be given a graphic organizer strategy, as well as the strategies for marking through unimportant information and highlighting important information. Once we have covered the strategies, students will be given time to exercise their new strategies with a connected reading. 

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Materials:

• Pencils, for students without one

• Highlighter, for each student

• Blank Copier Paper, for each student to make a graphic organizer

• Sheets of Notebook Paper, for each student to write summary

• Comprehension Check Questions Worksheet, found in assessment portion of this lesson design

• Copies of the Article, “The Moon Landing,” by National Geographic Kids

• Rubric for grading summaries

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Procedures:

1. Explain Summarization: Say: Now that we are all becoming fluent readers, it’s time for us to read to learn. In order to read to learn, we must comprehend the text, which just means to understand and remember what we are reading. The best way to read comprehensively is to summarize the information that we are reading. To summarize information, we must delete information that is not important or information that repeats itself, arrange the information in the most logical order, and be able to compose a statement that covers everything the writer is trying to say about the information. Before we get to summarizing, have you ever wondered how humans got to the moon? Do you ever think about how the moon landing helped us in future space explorations? Well later we will read an article titled, “The Moon Landing,” and learn more about how America made it to the moon and why it is so important to know. 

2. Review Important Vocabulary: Say: Before we get started on using skills to summarize, I wanted to review some vocabulary from the article we are going to read to help us better understand the information. The first vocabulary word is aeronautics, this word basically means travelling through the sky. Aeronautics does not mean travelling through the ocean. Usually, we see this word when we refer to planes or rocket ships. [Follow directly with modeling aeronautics in the next step. Return to Review and Model orbit.] The second vocabulary word is orbit, which basically means rotating around something or someone. Orbiting around the Sun is something that all the planets in our solar system do. If something is completely still, it is not in orbit. 

3. Model Important Vocabulary: Say: Let me show you how I would use aeronautics in a sentence. Aeronautics is about flying through the air, so how about: “The pilot had to first pass his aeronautics exam to get a job flying planes.” Is aeronautics about riding in a car? How about flying in a rocket? Which one of these words is most related to aeronautics: a bird or a fish? A person running a marathon or a person skydiving? Now complete this sentence: The aeronautics team … [possible answer:] built a model airplane to fly in the air. Let me show you how I would use orbit in a sentence. To orbit something means to rotate around, so how about: “Rodney orbited the classroom and could not find anything that was of interest to him.” When something is in orbit does that mean it is rotating or completely still? Which of these items are in orbit: the Earth around the Sun, the tree planted in the ground? What about the stars far outside our galaxy, or the satellites surrounding our planet? Now complete this sentence: The planet Jupiter has 63 moons … [possible answer:] since the planet is so big, the moons stay in orbit. 

4. Graphic Organizer Explanation: Say: Let’s remember the steps for summarization that we talked about earlier. [Take responses from students.] That’s right, we must delete information that is not important, or information that repeats itself, arrange the information in the most logical order, and be able to compose a statement that covers everything the writer is trying to say about the information. Something that is helpful to remember is that summarizing details support the main idea of the passage; think of the details as legs holding up the main idea table. When we do our graphic organizer, we want for the main idea to be written on the table, with legs coming out of the sides to support our main idea. We can have as many legs as we want to, as long as they support our main idea. So, let’s draw a circle in the middle of our blank piece of paper and label it “Main Idea.” 

5. Provide Practice with First Paragraph: Say: Let’s read the first paragraph from “The Moon Landing,” “On July 20, 1969, millions of people gathered around their televisions to watch two U.S. astronauts do something no one had ever done before. Wearing bulky space suits and backpacks of oxygen to breathe, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon.” When we read this the important information is going to be names, dates, and events. So first, highlight, “July 20, 1969.” Then what are the names and events that are important? [Wait for answers.] That’s right, highlight “Neil Armstrong,” “Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin,” and “first human beings to walk on the moon.” Now go back through and lightly mark through the information that we didn’t need. After that we have our main idea, so, take that information and write a sentence to go in your main idea bubble. 

6. Extend Practice to Entire Article: Say: Now that we have all found the main idea together, I want you to go through the rest of the article and find ideas that support the main idea. Remember to mark through information that is unimportant, or repeating, highlight important names, dates, and events, and compose thoughtful sentences that support our main idea. Once you have completed your graphic organizer, I want you to write a thoughtful summarizing paragraph of the information that you have found. After you have written your paragraph, bring it to me so I can read it. Then, grab a comprehension question sheet off my desk and complete at your seat. If you need help, come ask me and we will try to answer it together. I really want you all to complete this on your own so I can see how well we are comprehending new information. 

7. Assessment: For assessment, I will review each student’s main idea sentence, as well as look over each article for successful summarization skills, after all students have completed their comprehension questions. I will use a scoring rubric to grade their summary paragraphs for correct information:

In the student’s paragraph did they:

1. Delete unimportant or repeating information? Yes / No

2. Highlight important information? Yes / No

3. Write a concise topic sentence? Yes / No

4. Superordinate information and events? Yes / No

5. Write their paragraph as topic sentence, then supporting details? Yes / No

Comprehension Check Questions​:

1. What did Neil Armstrong say when he stepped foot on the moon?

2. Why was it important that we landed on the moon before any other country?

3. Who issued that Americans would be on the moon 10 years from the first American in Space? 

4. Why did America want to be the first people to reach the moon? (Think about who they were “racing,” and what we know was happening during this time from our history book.)

5. How did Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin’s teammate Michael Collins stay close enough to retrieve them from the moon’s surface?

6. What did the astronauts collect from the moon’s surface to bring back to Earth?

7. How long did Neil Armstrong and Edwin Baldwin stay on the moon’s surface, inside and outside the spaceship?

8. Have humans been back to the moon since the 1970s?

9. Why was it so important to science that humans went to the moon?

10. In the picture with the flag, why is it not waving in the wind like flags here on Earth?

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References:

Stephen Harvey, David A. Aguilar, and Patricia Daniels, "The Moon Landing"

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/moon-landing

Anna Laws, Swimming into Summarization

https://afl0003.wixsite.com/website/reading-to-learn

Mallie Stone, Summarization Station

https://mvs0002.wixsite.com/msstonesstudies/reading-to-learn