Peck Reading Lesson Overview #2

The focus of my second reading lesson, will be on writing summaries. More specifically gathering and deciphering which information is important to include in summaries. Using an technique described in the Neufeld article, the students will create idea webs/idea map about the article.  I will begin the lesson by reading the article about sneezing to the students. After reading the article I will have the students by themselves read through the article. After the students read through the article they will be asked to write down any ideas that they can remember from the text and circle each of these ideas.  The students will then look at their own webs and be told to figure out which circles are the main ideas of the text, and what ideas are just supporting drawing lines from the supporting ideas to the main ideas. To do this, the students will be asked "Do you need this idea to understand what the article is about?" or "Is this related to another idea already written down" etc.  They will then share and compare this "web of ideas" with the other focus student seeing the similarities and differences between their webs and then each focus student will then write a summary of the article.

The first focus student I choose to do this lesson with is Charles, he is a active, talkative, "popular" student. He is a middle range student but struggles with comprehending and deciphering the main ideas out of passages. When I work with him in social studies, he has a hard time summarizing paragraphs,  reading but missing the "big picture" of a text. I'm hoping that this one on a one work will help him to better his strategy and maybe refer back to this idea when he is stuck or has to write a summary. 

The second focus student that will be doing this lesson will be Ashley. She would fall under a higher level thinker in the class. From my experience with her she has a good grasp on writing summaries and can usually pin point the main ideas and facts from readings. She is more of a focus student in terms of helping to provide scaffolding and modeling to the other student who struggles with summarizing. While we are discussing our webs, she may be able to give insight into why ideas are more important than others, in a way that is more understandable to Charles, than anything I could say.  Plus, this will be a new technique she can use to build her skills and refine her summaries, to make them better.