Peck Reading Lesson Plan #2

Reading Lesson Plan #2

Rationale: These two focus students have some techniques when it comes to writing summaries, but struggle finding main points to support the “big idea” of passages. I have experienced these students write summaries using supporting evidence and commonly missing the main ideas.  One of the focus students needs to refine her summaries, while the other student needs to learn how to decipher the main ideas from supporting detail of a passage. Hopefully having the two work collaboratively will help improve both of their summarization skills.

Objectives: Deciphering main ideas from supporting detail in order to write a summary of a passage.

Materials and Supplies: Copies of the passage, paper, pencil

Introduction (4-7 minutes)
- I will connect my lesson with the students having to write summaries from their social studies book as they do frequently.
- I will ask the students how confident they feel about their summary writing abilities and will probe to see what issues or what the students find hard about writing summaries.
- I will tell the students that today I am going to show them a new technique, a kind of pre planning method before writing a summary that will make writing them easier.

During the Lesson (10-15 minutes)

- I will read the article “Achoo” about sneezing to the students. The students will then be given the article and asked to read it again, and then write notes or ideas about what the article talked about in their own words.
- I will show the two students an example of what I mean by writing “You can sneeze from pepper”.
- The students will take a few minutes to write down notes and ideas about the article. I will then ask the students to share their paper with each other and go through as a team and circle the ideas that they think are the most important (crossing out ideas that they both have and just keeping one).
- I will provide them with a way to check if they can’t figure out if an idea is a circled or “main idea” by asking “If we took this out of the article would you lose a lot of meaning?”  or “ If I took this part out of the article would the article still make sense?”
- With some of these ideas that are not main or important ideas I will see if the students can connect these ideas to important ideas. And will show them an example “You can sneeze from pepper” is related to “noses are very sensitive” and draw a line connecting the two ideas.
- As the students “web” begins to take shape, less instruction and leading will come from me as the students will work together and discuss whether the ideas are main ideas or supporting ideas.
- If there is time I will have the students together use their web to write a summary about the article.

Discuss: (4-5 minutes)
- I will explain how you don’t have to complete an entire web for every passage you read but you can think about some of the things we did or what you thought of when trying to decide if an idea was important or not.
- Do you guys think that this makes writing summaries easier? Would you use this technique again? 

Ongoing Assessment:
-The visual diagram that the students create will show me their guided thinking through out the task. By having the students single out ideas and check them for main idea purposes it can be seen where and if there are misconceptions, and those misconceptions can be corrected. 

Adaptations
-Adaptations to this lesson would include different leveled readings for students who may struggle with longer passages and articles such as this.