Main Ideas for Middle School Readers

 Helping readers to find main ideas is important work. It's also complicated, messy, and challenging enough to make me want to tear out my hair! Those of us who remember working through the colors of the SRA reading kits as students were never really taught how to find a main idea. (Here's an interesting blog post about the history of the color-coded kits!)  Instead, we just read the paragraphs and guessed until we figured out the pattern on our own! As a teacher I wanted to do a little bit more than just have a set of materials in the corner.

What is a main idea?

Too many students and teachers confuse topic and main idea. As I wrote in my book Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling, a topic is the superordinate word or phrase to which all of the ideas in a passage refer (Aulls 1975). On the other hand, a main idea is best expressed in a complete sentence. Sometimes an author states the main idea; sometimes an author leaves the main idea implicit. The old Write Source 2000 books called this "a topic + an attitude or statement about the topic" which is a good definition to use with students.

Why is this so hard?

Skilled readers create mental models of a text as they read, building a hierarchy of ideas. You may be doing this right now with this text! However, less skilled readers often connect one sentence only to the one before or after. They are reading at a very local level, and rarely see the big picture (Kintsch 1990). To teach main idea, then, is to help students see nested hierarchy of ideas in a text--paragraphs have main ideas, but so do sections, and so does the text as a whole.

It sounds so simple to talk about it, but if you've ever looked at a roomful of sixth graders you know that saying, "Let's look for a nested hierarchy of ideas in the text!" is not likely to bring you much success as a teacher. Part of the difficulty is rooted in the fact that authors express main ideas in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are at the beginning of the text, sometimes they are at the. end, and sometimes they are not stated at all. Distressingly, some texts written for students seem not to have a main idea at all!

Working with middle school readers

My favorite order for teaching main idea is to follow these steps:

• Single paragraphs with explicit main idea at the beginning
• Single paragraphs with explicit main idea in another location
• Multi-paragraph pieces with an explicit main idea
• Poorly written pieces

With sixth and seventh grade readers, I am often tempted to go directly to the third step and jump right into multi-paragraph pieces. Year after year, though, I have learned that skipping main ideas at the paragraph level can lead to big problems later on! I generally like to start with one of the single paragraph activities from my text set Main Ideas and Details in Expository Text or my old standby Finding Topics and Main Ideas (free PowerPoint). Depending on how these go, I can move directly on to multi-paragraph pieces or stick around in single paragraph land for awhile.

New Resource

When I can't find a text, I write my own! This resource was written to accompany the Wonders Unit 1, Week 3, but it can be used for most sixth and seventh grade readers. It includes a single text about extremophiles, along with a tree map graphic organizer that shows the hierarchy of ideas in the text. In addition, comprehension questions refer to the individual paragraphs and sections as well as to the article as a whole, leading students to consider how the ideas fit together. You can find it here: Middle School Main Ideas: Article and Activities for Grades 6-7.

References

Aulls, M.W. 1975. "Expository Paragraph Properties that Influence Literal Recall." Journal of Reading Behavior 7: 391-400.

Kintsch, E. 1990. "Macroprocesses and Microprocesses in the Development of Summarization Skill." Cognition and Instruction 7: 161-95.

Kissner, E. 2006. Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling: Skills for Better Reading, Writing, and Test-Taking. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.