Reading to Learn Lesson Design

Practicing about-point with Pandas!

Caroline Bibbee

Rationale: In this lesson, the students will be learning summarization. Summarization is one of the best strategies for comprehending and understanding text. The strategy of summarizing we will be practicing is called “about-point”, which asks the students two questions about the text they are summarizing. The first question is: “What is the text about?” The answer to this question will become the subject of the students topic sentence. The next question is: “What is the main point the writer is making about the topic?”. The main point the author makes will be the predicate to the topic sentence. 

Materials: Each student will need a copy of the article, “Smithsonian's National Zoo Welcomes A New Giant Panda Cub” 

Procedures: 

Say: “Okay class today we are going to learn about summarization. Good fluent readers are also good summarizers. Good readers do not try to remember everything, they use strategies to remember only the important points the author is making in what they read. They take the whole text and simplify it down into one big main idea.”

The best way to summarize is called, “about-point”. In this method you are going to answer two questions after reading. The first question is, “What is the text about?”. This is an easy question. The next question is, “What is the main point the author is making?”. To answer this question you need to think of everything the author talked about in the text and then come up with one big idea that covers all of it. 

In just a few minutes we are going to practice this technique for ourselves! We are each going to be reading an article about pandas! Have any of you ever seen a panda bear in real life? 

Let’s talk about some of the important vocabulary words in the article. One word that is mentioned in the article is “endangered”. Has anyone heard this word before? The word endangered means there are few left alive and that they are very rare. Panda bears are an endangered species because there are only so many left around the world. 

We are going to prace about-point summarization as a class before you work alone. Here is one paragraph from the article: 

Bei Bei's 2019 departure from the Smithsonian's National Zoo, to join the giant panda breeding program in China's Wolong Nature Reserve, left a big void for fans. What made the loss of the adorable cub even more poignant was the belief that his mother, Mei Xiang, was too old to have more offspring. However, on August 21, 2020, the 22-year-old proved experts wrong by giving birth to a healthy cub.

This paragraph is about how Mei Xianh the panda bear went against all odds and gave birth to a baby panda bear cub even though the experts did not think it was possible. Now I want you to turn to your partner and try answering the two questions for about-point summarization. 

Once you are done with your partner, I want you to read the entire article on your own. Then on a sheet of paper, I want you to answer the two questions, and then form a topic sentence about the article. The subject of the sentence will be the answer to the first question, and the predicate of the sentence will be the answer to the second question. You are writing a short version of the article you will read in your own words. Remember to only include the most important details! We will have a quiz over this article once we are all done with our summaries! 

Assessment: Collect each students summary and grade it based on this check list: 

___ collected important information 

___ignored trivia and examples 

___Significanly reduced the text 

___Sentences brought ideas from each paragraph 

___sentences organized into paragraph form 

Quiz (for after the summaries) 

What does “endangered” mean? 

How much do newborn pandas weigh? 

Why did doctors think Mei Xiang could not have a healthy cub? 

How long are panda cubs unable to crawl or see? 

Resources: 

https://murraba.wixsite.com/readinglessons/reading-to-learn

https://www.dogonews.com/2020/8/25/smithsonians-national-zoo-welcomes-a-new-giant-panda-cub