Teaching Main Idea

This week we worked a lot on understanding main idea, as well as trying to determine it. I teach that main idea is a "one sentence summary of the text." In fact, every time I say "main idea," the students have to shout back the line at me! They really get this nailed into there head after saying this about 10 million times a day! Later on, in the year when I start teaching fiction skills and focus on theme, I do a week of comparing the differences between theme and main idea so students really get a clear understanding of both. Here are a few activities I did with my 4th graders to help them understand main idea.

Before I started with my anchor chart, I pulled out a brown bag. I pulled out a ticket, popcorn, cake, birthday hat, and some balloons. I then asked the students what all the items had in common. After discussion, we came up with a movie birthday party! I told them they were correct and that was the MAIN IDEA of my bag. Then I made this anchor chart with them. 

While we made the anchor chart, each student had a nonfiction book that we flipped through and pointed out each of the "clues."

At the end of this lesson, I put the students into groups and told them each group would be making there own brown bag with there own main idea! I gave each group this organizer to plan out their bags. The following day they presented their bags to the class while we all tried to guess what their main idea was. The kids really got into this! Here are a few pictures of the bags they came up with!

Baking 

Football

Football

Birthday Party

Going to the Movies

School!

Through out the week we worked on some main idea stations. The students rotated through the following stations each day with a buddy. 

Here is a sentence sort. The main idea was found in the topic sentence.  

This station was very challenging for my students! I printed out various articles on interesting topics from time for kids. I had a star wars article, baseball, Dolphin tale, a volcano, and other options for students to choose from. I glued the article on the front of a 9x18 piece of construction paper that was folded in half. On the inside I wrote the "catchy title" on one side and the subtitle (main idea) on the other side. Students were to read through the article and give it a catchy title as well as try to identify the main idea. Afterwards, they opened the construction paper and checked if they were close. They struggled coming up with the main idea, but loved the catchy titles!

My third station was some differentiated task cards! You can download them for free here

After students got some practice with main idea, we focused on PROVING the main idea by identifying key details. I used these two articles from super teacher worksheets as well as multiple articles from my student's scholastic news magazines. We read articles together (2 a day) and decided on the main idea together. Then we went back and highlighted any evidence that proved we were correct. This really helped to solidify main idea AND had them finding evidence in non fiction text. 

At the end of our two weeks I gave students a brief main idea assessment. We will be revisiting this skill throughout the whole year in reading and writing! I hope you can use some of these ideas with your own class!