Comprehension Lesson

Name: Tatianna Johnson

Grade 2^nd

Group: The Puppies (low reading group)

Rationale: This lesson is designed for students to understand the importance of summarizing a story for a retell.

Lesson Topic:  Comprehension through summarizing

Objective: The students will be able to read through a story and notice important details that will be used in a summary.

Materials:

-       Book The Adventures of Taxi Dog

-       Paper

-       Pencil

Introduction

-       I will begin the lesson by informing the students what we will be doing for the lesson.

-       I will then explain to the students what comprehension strategy we will be discussing for the lesson

-       I will then go over what a summary is

o   Retailing important details

o   Crunching what we read into smaller chunks of information

o   Remembering the important information

-       After the students have a understanding of what a summary is, I will then highlight key elements of how we write a good summary, students will create a checklist

o   What is the book about?

o   Is this detail important to the main idea of the story?

o   Should I remember this detail?

o   What order should my ideas be in?

o   What is the main idea?

o   Are there any underlining main ideas?

During the Lesson

-       We will read the story together one time through

-       I will instruct students to go back over the story silently (or whisper reading) and answer the questions in the checklist we created.

-       I will tell students that it is their job to try and convince their classmates to read The Adventures of Taxi Dog

-       I will ask the students what the story is about

-       Together we will work as a group to write a summary for the story while paying special attention to the language we use and the order we choose to place important topics.

-       After we create a summary we will read it together to make sure it meets the requirements of a good summary

-       We will select one student from the group to read their summary to the class, and afterwards ask them if they would like to read the book based on the summary that was given.

Closing summary

-       I will have students return to the group and we will go over what a good summary is

-       I will have them create a poster for the entire class that includes what a summary is and what a good summary looks like.

-       Students will post this in the classrooms reading section

On-Going Assessment

-       Students will use their checklist to write a summary for one book they read this week

-       Each student will exchange their summaries with a student that has not read their book

-       The students will continue to pass along their summaries until someone wants to read the book that they have created the summary for.

Reflection

            I really enjoyed this lesson because students seemed to have fun creating persuasive summaries. The book that we read, The Adventures of a Taxi Dog, was chosen by the group, so I believe that it made students more interested in writing the summaries. This particular group is a low reading group so the book was appropriate for their level. When students had to skim the story by themselves, I noticed that most of them were using the pictures in the book to help them summarized what was important. I think that this was a good strategy for them because it helped them remember what was happening in the story.

Some of them were using to much information so we had to decided what should stay and what should go. The Students decided this based on main ideas and underlining ideas that support the main idea. I noticed that many of them struggled with this so we spent a lot of time figuring out what the main idea was and what ideas support it. Once students understood what was important, I think that they found it easy to place these events in the proper order.

I think that the fact that students had to persuade their classmates to read the book really helped them enjoy the activity. Having them create a poster for the entire class gave them a sense of ownership and pride. I now believe that they will be able to comprehend the things that they read because they will be focused on what important aspects could go well in a summary.