Mastering Main Idea and Details

Stu­dents strug­gle to mas­ter main idea and details, but it helps to intro­duce the skill in a vari­ety of mean­ing­ful ways that includes chart­ing exist­ing texts and writ­ing their own. I have taught both ele­men­tary and high school stu­dents and I know their mas­tery of main idea and details doesn’t just get bet­ter with time. Get­ting mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions cor­rect on main idea and details often means stu­dents have a cur­so­ry, not deep, under­stand­ing.

How Do I Plan for Mastery?

Give Them a Picture

The first thing I did was give the stu­dents a visu­al we could eas­i­ly con­nect with. I showed them a draw­ing of a park from a book. There were peo­ple fish­ing in the lake, walk­ing around, etc. We dis­cussed all the things going on in the pic­ture. Then, I talked about main idea and details. We con­nect­ed the entire pic­ture to the main idea and the small things (like the trees) to the details. Now that the men­tal con­nec­tion is made, I can ask if we are look­ing for the the whole pic­ture or the trees. Stu­dents think about the actu­al pic­ture before answer­ing. They have some­thing real to hook that con­cept to. I make sure we review that we have con­nect­ed those sym­bols to main idea and details so on a test they’re not look­ing for “trees.”

Chart the Text

We read a mul­ti-para­graph text togeth­er and iden­ti­fied the main idea. First, we chart­ed the text by num­ber­ing the lines and label­ing the para­graphs, which aids in our dis­cus­sions. Then, we dis­cussed the main idea of the entire pas­sage. On our sec­ond read­ing, I intro­duced the idea that each para­graph also has main idea (a small­er pic­ture) and details to sup­port it (small­er trees). Stu­dents than answered ques­tions about the text to close off the les­son.

Utilize a Great Graphic Organizer

The next day, we uti­lized an FCRR graph­ic orga­niz­er in our read­ing of the anchor text, Plan­et Earth. Stu­dents wrote the top­ic and three main ideas (the headings/topics of each sec­tion helped us iden­ti­fy the main idea). I could ask, “If we know this sec­tion is about ____, which sen­tence gives us the big pic­ture.” I could fol­low up with, “How do we know this is not a tree?” For each main idea sec­tion, we added two details. Here’s where I added a mini-review on para­phras­ing. We worked togeth­er to craft mean­ing­ful detail sen­tences in our own words that com­bined infor­ma­tion from mul­ti­ple sen­tences. I want­ed them to see the dif­fer­ence between rich details that sup­port the main idea and less impor­tant ones.

Let Them Struggle (a Little)

I will fol­low up this activ­i­ty with an “on your own” main idea and detail activ­i­ty using the same book and same graph­ic orga­niz­er. Stu­dents will take the next head­ings and find the main idea and details.

The next step will be to see if they can apply it to an unfa­mil­iar text at their own read­ing lev­el. I will have them pick a sci­ence book and give them the same graph­ic orga­niz­er. They will read and chart the main idea and details on their own. I will have them share their infor­ma­tion with a part­ner, who will eval­u­ate whether they have iden­ti­fied the “main pic­ture” and the “trees” cor­rect­ly.

Wrap it Up with Writing

Final­ly, I will task the stu­dents with writ­ing an emer­gency evac­u­a­tion plan (which we have to do) using this main idea and details tem­plate to orga­nize their infor­ma­tion pri­or to writ­ing. Again, a peer will review it and pro­vide feed­back. Then, I will review the graph­ic orga­niz­ers in pairs and give feed­back to the writ­ers and their review­ers.

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Check out my oth­er edu­ca­tion posts here.

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