LESSON PLAN:

Retelling ■■Preparation Learning Objective Students will learn about summarizing and retelling information they have heard. They will learn to use the 5 Ws questions and about the importance of good listening. Pacing 45–90 minutes Suggested Readings “Eleven-Year-Old Interviews the President” by Achieve3000 or any other Achieve3000 article of your choosing

Lesson Overview In this lesson, students learn about summarizing and retelling information they have read or heard. They begin by summarizing a movie or other entertainment source with which they are familiar and from which they hear a good summary. They work in pairs to read and summarize a story and are introduced to the steps for creating good summaries. They practice summarizing using the 5 Ws questions and learn the importance of good listening. They read an interview, demonstrate their understanding, and compose a summary of the interview. The lesson is extended by students paraphrasing and summarizing a News article and orally presenting sentences.

Do Before Teaching 1. Photocopy the 5 Ws graphic organizer. 2. Photocopy the Lesson Masters for each pair of students. Before distributing them, cut the page in half and give one story to each student in the pair. 3. Have student vocabulary journals ready for this lesson.

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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Retelling

■■Teaching Routine Before Reading Introduce Lesson (10-15 minutes) • As a class activity, create a summary of each story from the Lesson Master. Suggest the following steps: Identify the important ideas. Use the way the story is organized to tell the ideas. Ignore the ideas that are not important. Rephrase the information in your own words. Make the summary interesting and enjoyable for the listener. • As students compose the summary, write their statements on the board. Edit them as necessary, being sure to include the important ideas and keeping the summary short. When you have finished, read the summaries out loud so students can hear them read with correct pronunciation, prosody, and intonation. Provide Direct Instruction and Modeling (10 minutes) • Explain that summarizing what you have read or heard is a good way to remember it better. You have to think about what you have read or heard and put it in your own words. This is exactly what you do when you see a great movie. You want to tell your friends about it so they will understand why you like it. Maybe they will want to see it, too. • Project the 5 Ws graphic organizer so all students can see it. Tell them that they will read an article and use this organizer to summarize the article. • Remind them that the ideas on this organizer can be used to summarize what they hear, too. When they are listening to someone, they should listen carefully and pay attention to the “who, what, when, where, and why” of what the person is saying. • Emphasize the importance of being able to summarize what you have read or heard. This is an important skill in school and in many different careers. Learning to summarize takes time, so it is important to practice both writing and speaking a summary.

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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Retelling

During Reading Student Practice (15–25 minutes) • Next, have students complete the 5-Step Literacy Routine with “Eleven-Year-Old Interviews the President” or any other Achieve3000 article.

The 5-Step Literacy Routine 1. Before-reading Poll — Brings students’ prior knowledge into the classroom as they make connections and express opinions about the topic of the day. Extra Support Depending on students’ education background, they may or may not know what an interview is. Explain that an interview is one person asking questions of another. Reporters like to interview celebrities like movie stars, singers, sports stars, and politicians.

Extra Support • You may find it helpful to read the questions and answer choices aloud before having students answer them. • As students answer the questions, circulate among them to make sure they understand what they are supposed to do. Explain any unfamiliar words or sentence formations that might be confusing by using contextual analysis and think-aloud.

2. Article — Students derive information from nonfiction articles differentiated to their levels. Repeated exposure to vocabulary and embedded strategy support enables all students to participate in classroom discussions. Access to grade-level text and activities ensure that students have frequent interactions with grade-appropriate complex text. 3. Activity — Students demonstrate successful close reading of text by responding to text-dependent questions that require higher-order thinking skills. 4. After-reading Poll — All students express their opinions again, based on the reading they did that day, with teachers requiring students to provide evidence for their opinions. Teachers then facilitate discussion and debates in the classroom. 5. Thought Question — A critical-thinking activity guides students to write in more formal scenarios with the intent to either argue or inform about a situation or narrate an event. After mastering the concepts at reading-level, students have the opportunity to complete the same Article and Activity at grade level. They can also review their Poll results from both before and after reading and reflect on how their readings and experiences affect the evolution of their opinions.

After Reading Whole-Class Wrap Up (5-10 minutes) • When all students have completed the 5-Step Literacy Routine (or at least the first two steps), bring the class together to review the lesson, discuss any questions students have, and provide any reteaching that is needed. • Project the 5 Ws graphic organizer so all students can see it. As a class activity, have students answer the questions. Write the answers briefly on the board.

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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Retelling

■■Lesson Extensions • Project the Related Reading “Talking Gets Easier” so all students can see it. Read the selection out loud while students follow along silently. Have volunteers summarize each paragraph of the story. Students may work in small groups to compose the summary for each paragraph, having one person in the group write the summary statement and another reading it out loud. • Have a Paraphrase Practice session. Read out loud each sentence from the Paraphrase Practice master. Have volunteers paraphrase each sentence. Remind students that paraphrasing means to say something using your own words. This is one of the important steps in summarizing. When you can paraphrase what someone has said, it shows you listened, understood, and were interested. Continue the Paraphrase Practice periodically. Have students form pairs. Each member of the pair should tell about something interesting that happened. The other partner should listen carefully and paraphrase what was said. As students improve their listening skills, the partners can increase the length of the vignettes they share.

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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Retelling

■■Lesson Masters The 5 Ws Who?

Lesson Masters

What?

When?

Where?

Why?

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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Retelling

Story A

Lesson Masters

Today we tell time with clocks. It seems like there are clocks everywhere. There are clocks on walls. Some people have wristwatches. If you have a cell phone, it has a clock. Long ago, there were no clocks. People told time during the day by looking at the sun. At night, they did not know what time it was. The first tool that people used to tell time was a sundial. They put a stick in the ground. They marked how the shadow moved. This method worked well on sunny days. When it was cloudy or at night, it didn’t work. Another way to tell time was with candles. Marks were made on the candles. As the candle burned, it marked the passing of time. A water clock was a special kind of bowl. It had a hole in it. When you filled the bowl with water, it leaked out. Marks were on the bowl. As the water got lower, it showed the time.

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Lesson MastersRetelling

Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Story B In the past, zoos were sad places. The animals lived in small cages and pens. They were not very happy. People realized that this was bad for the animals. The animals needed room to live and grow. Slowly zoos changed. The cages and pens were torn down. Large areas were built. Animals were allowed to roam freely in their new homes. There were no more bars. Moats and walls keep the animals in where they are safe. Today zoos are beautiful and exciting. Many rare animals live in zoos. Some of these animals can no longer be found in the wild. Zoos help to save rare animals. There is another place like a zoo. It is even more open. This place is called a wildlife park. The animals have a lot of room. It is almost like being free. People go through the park in a car. They can see the animals. Both the people and animals are safe. Best of all, the animals are happy.

ELL Connections

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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan

Retelling

Paraphrase Practice

Lesson Masters

When Ramon went into his room and started to unpack, he heard a thumping noise come down the stairs toward him. A large van pulled into the yard, and when the boy and a girl got out, some happy dogs came out of the house to greet them. The day of Carla’s birthday party had finally arrived, and she was looking forward to having her friends over for a party in the back yard. The farmer drove his tractor into the field, but it was so muddy that he got stuck and had to walk back home to call for help. When Yong walked by the park, she was surprised to see that some birds were building a nest on a statue, not in a tree.

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