Summarizing Activity

Main Ideas/Argument for Susan D’Agostino’s “Penguins Are Nature’s Best Snugglers”
Purpose: D’Agostino’s purpose is to inform readers over the natural phenomenon of penguin
huddling for warmth that can reveal more about their environment and health.

Big Ideas/Arguments:
 Penguin huddles result in equitable heat distribution for the whole community.
1. Penguin huddles reveal a high degree of mathematical efficiency which can be utilized to
study its colonies
2. Penguins arrange themselves in hexagonal grids and cycle from the cold exterior to the
warm interior when wind flow and temperature precipitates them to.
3. The “mover” penguin initiates the huddling process by locating other penguins with the
least amount of heat loss.
4. Penguins are in perfect arrangement displaying a geometric oblong shape once the
huddling has commenced.
5. Scientists take into account temperature and wind speed as well as breeding cycle to
understand what dictates penguin huddling.
6. This mathematical precision can be utilized as an indirect measure for penguin’s fat
content and energy reserves.
7. Scientists are currently hypothesizing that changes in initial huddling temperatures could
reveal changes in the colony’s health.

Must Haves/ “Big Umbrellas”:

Main Ideas/ Arguments 1, 2 and 3 are necessary and go hand-in-hand as they detail the penguin
huddling process which is the core of the article. Points 5 and 6 can be viewed as a “so what” to
the whole penguin huddling process detailing why it’s important to study. Point 7 stand out to
me as it kind of ends the article by stating that there is more analyzing to conduct which can lead
to future discoveries.

Draft: Studying penguin huddles where they arrange themselves in hexagonal grids to combat
the cold benefits scientists’ studies of penguin breeding cycles, nutrition and colony health.
 Sophisticated Attributions Activity:

The passage from the Student Model of Sophisticated Attributions details the gradual
increase of certain pelagic species over the years in Californian seas. The author presents data
and statistics from a survey to monitor certain organisms in the ocean. The author does so by
introducing the experiment in the opening sentence followed by ethically citing the source of the
study by including an in-text citation. This is important because the writer has correctly utilized
the information of another study to complement the writing while avoiding plagiarism. Even
though the particular study conducted is not specifically mentioned, the author utilizes tools to
vicariously imply to readers that the following claims are supported by the basis of the opening
experiment. The author succeeds in this by utilizing diction such as “Results demonstrate”, “For
instance” and “Moreover” to open sentences 2, 3, 5 and 6 respectively. Doing so serves as a sort
of call back to the experiment conducted in the topic sentence which is fundamental to the
writer’s purpose for the paragraph. A shift is present in sentence 7 where the author presents new
information about the presence of never before seen underwater species as ocean temperatures
increased. Knowing this to be new information to the readers, the author again ethically gives
credit to this piece of data by including an in-text citation and continues to build off on what has
already been established.