Lesson plans should have a logical and consistent format. Although standards differ from district to district and teacher to teacher, most have the basic format: the identification section, the skills section and the agenda section. The identification section identifies the teacher, school, grade level and topic. The skills section identifies the skills from the state’s curriculum standards that are taught in the lesson. The agenda describes what takes place in the classroom in chronological order.
This section describes what skills are needed and what skills the lesson develops. Define and discuss any terms and ideas that will be used in the lesson. These ideas include characters, theme, plot and the idea of conflict and resolution. It also includes the idea of a guide sheet where all of these aspects of a story are listed and explained.
Pass out the guide sheets and discuss each term that will be used to develop the summary. Encourage students to use their own life experiences for “inferencing” – deducing what the author might be talking about but not actually saying. Discuss “mood” and “background,” which can be important for summarizing some articles.
Have the students fill in the aspects of the summary in the guide sheet while reading the article. Let them know that it is sometimes helpful to describe some aspect of a story or article by comparing it to books, movies and folktales. Students especially seem to enjoy the Hollywood cliche of summing up a story in terms of two other stories. An example of this is summing up the movie “Cast Away” as “Robinson Crusoe” meets “Sleepless in Seattle.”
If the class is short, there will only be enough time for the student to write the summary from the guide sheet. In this case, the next class can begin with students reading their summaries and describing how they went from guide sheet to summary. If the class is long enough, a fixed amount of time can be allotted for writing the summary, and the summary process can be examined and critiqued the same day.