Main idea can be a hard concept to teach and an even harder concept for students to master. On the surface it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. After all, aren’t you just asking students to find the main idea? The problem is for young readers and even students into the upper elementary grades and beyond it really isn’t that easy. Oftentimes students struggle to mentally sort between the overarching idea or purpose of a passage and the supporting details. Here are five strategies that can help you with teaching main idea.
- Use Anchor Charts
For some students all they need is helpful guidance from an anchor chart or a classroom poster. Anchor charts can be a teachers best friend because:
- They allow room for a student to work through the process on their own.
- It helps to give students the moves that they need to follow without asking an elbow buddy or a teacher.
- Use Visuals and Pictures
Students who may not excel at reading are more than able to identify pictures or images. They are also quite adept at analyzing pictures as well. It also allows for teachers to get through multiple practice rounds of identifying the main idea without having to take the time to read through cumbersome passages. Some interesting ideas you can use in the classroom are:
- Image sets such as an elephant, an alligator and a gazelle might help students get the main idea of animals. Upper grades can be challenged to hone in on African Animals.
- Have students use free resources like Pixabay to create image sets to challenge their classmates.
- As students get more proficient this can still be used as remediation and test prep to check for understanding.
- Make Sure Students Look at Titles
Before even reading a story, article or passage have students focus solely on the title and make predictions about the material they are going to read. This can be beneficial in a classroom because:
- It teaches students pre-reading skills.
- It teaches students to identify main ideas from titles.
- It creates excitement and competition in the classroom, driving learning.
- What’s First and What’s Last?
Have students focus on the opening and closing lines of the read. There are a couple of reasons why students should get in the habit of doing this after reading the title.
- Oftentimes the main idea will be contained in the first or last line.
- If both the beginning and ending lines of the writing match it will help you to easily identify the main idea.
- This will also be a great pre-reading strategy for readers of all levels.
- Using Key Words
Keywords are a great tool that students have at their disposal but it takes time for students to learn the scanning skills to be able to pick up keywords unassisted. Key words are so important because they can be integral for students being able to pick out the main idea of a piece of writing. Some ways to practice this with students are the following:
- Have them track the bolded keywords in their school books.
- If available old textbooks can be recycled to lead to keyword scavenger hunts. Give each student a minute to see how many keywords they can find in a chapter.
- Use strategic partnering and a sticky note to have students keep track of keywords as they read together.
- Have students keep track of how many times a word is repeated. For higher grade levels also have them track synonyms!