5^th Grade

Babe to the Rescue       FIRST READING

From the book, Babe: The Gallant Pig

By Dick King-Smith 

Since this is a familiar movie, prediction won’t work with this selection but summarization will. 

Strategy Focus: Synthesis / Summarization 

Objective: Students will clarify understanding by summarizing important events and ideas of a story incident.  

Information for the teacher: Comprehension strategy — Synthesizing information

Ideas taken from the book, Strategies That Work page 25, also see chapter 10. “Synthesizing information involves combining new information with existing knowledge to form an original idea, a new line of thinking, or a new creation.” ... “The need to sift important ideas from interesting details is one challenge that trade literature presents to readers. It is often so well written that rich less important details carry readers away from the essential ideas. In order to synthesize what they read, readers need to stop every now and then, think about what they have read, and take stock of meaning before continuing on through the text. When readers synthesize, they

• stop and collect their thoughts before reading on

• sift important ideas from less important details
• summarize the information by briefly identifying the main point
• combine these main points into a larger concept or bigger idea
• make generalizations about what they have read

Before reading

Discuss what is synthesis. Discuss with students how summarizing a story or incident is a way of briefly retelling it by including the most important things that happened while leaving out less important details.  

During reading

Set purpose — while you are reading today I want you to synthesize what you are learning. Read the first season then tell your partner something you learned from this season. I call this “Say Something.” Think of these questions while you read:  

1. What main thing is Babe trying to do?
2. What happens when he tries to do it?

3. What does he learn from his experience? 

Read pages 230-231 then complete a GIST or WHO WANTED BUT SO lesson with the teacher.

Continue reading pages 232-233 then complete a GIST or WHO WANTED BUT SO lesson with the teacher.

Finish reading the selection then complete the GIST or WHO WANTED BUT SO lesson 

After reading

Discuss the events of what happened in the story by completing GIST or WHO WANTED BUT SO 
 

To find out if students understand how to summarize, ask them these questions and ask them to answer in ONE SENTENCE answers: 

1. What main thing is Babe trying to do?
2. What happens when he tries to do it?
3. What does he learn from his experience? 
   

Example of WHO WANTED BUT SO

After reading chapter one from The Jacket by Andrew Clements

WHO Phil

WANTED to get his brother’s jacket back from the black kid named Daniel

BUT Daniel claimed it was a birthday present from his Grandmother

SO they ended up in the principal’s office 
 

Teaching Summary with GIST

Directions: Read text. The GIST of something is the main idea. Sometimes we don’t need to remember all the details but read just to get the gist of the material.

Procedure:

• Draw 20 word sized blanks on the chalkboard.
• After reading a short section (in this care two pages of text), students will write a 20 word summary to give the gist of what they read.
• Now, read additional section of text (in this case two more pages of text). Information form both sections must be incorporated into a new 20 word summary.
• It is possible to read a third section of text (in this case the rest of the text) and condense the summary one more time.

GIST is taken from pp 130-131, Developing Readers and Writers in the Content Area K-12, Third Edition (Moore, Moore, Cunningham, and Cunningham, 1998) 

________ ________ ________ ________ ________  
 

________ ________ ________ ________ ________  
 

________ ________ ________ ________ ________  
 

________ ________ ________ ________ ________  
 

Warnings for GIST

• Choose your text carefully! If there is too much important information, it will be very difficult or impossible to condense the information to a 20 word summary.
• Be prepared to walk the students through the process of summarizing the first several times.
• With each additional section of text, it becomes more difficult to summarize. For that reason, call on struggling readers toward the beginning of the activity. This will allow more students to participate.

For example,

After a misunderstanding over ownership of a jacket two boys of different races deals with prejudice issues while learning acceptance.  
 
 

Some more hints for the teacher:

When teaching students to write a summary, encourage the children to use these words: first, next. Think about these ideas: Is it important to understand this piece, include concrete, sequential, beginning, middle, end