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.

Sixth Grade Wonders: Secret Life of Caves, Unit 1 Week 3

 This is my favorite week of the first unit of Wonders in sixth grade! Of course, if you know me and my interests, you will understand why. Caves, animal adaptations, deep sea exploration--this week has it all.

Which is why, in my classroom, it was never a single week of instruction. I think that the pacing of Wonders is far too fast, especially for complex texts and complex ideas. "Okay, kids, we're going to introduce the idea of chemosynthesis in a single day of reading. Don't understand the ideas in this text? No worries, we're already done and on to the next thing!" This doesn't really lead to the kind of thoughtful, reflective reading I hope to develop. So, for Unit 1 Week 3, I usually took 2-3 weeks.

Additions to the Wonders resources

In addition to the texts and activities provided in the weekly instruction, I supplemented with these resources.

Caverns Informational Text: This text, written by me for Reading Intervention, became a homework text to go along with the unit. I added a comprehension quiz and a note-taking sheet to reinforce the concepts of main idea.

Speed Drill and Questions for "The Secret Life of Caves"

Speed drills are a great way to increase fluency and help students to notice semantic elements. When I noticed that many of my students were skipping over the tougher words instead of breaking them apart, I added syllable practice to the page. This set also has some practice multiple choice questions and an open-ended response that mirrors the question for the Weekly Assessment.

Yeti Crab Subject and Predicate

My students loved reading about the yeti crab in "Journey Into the Deep," so I made them an additional grammar practice page starring this creature.

Troglobites Clip from BBC Earth

My students loved this clip and begged to watch it again during dismissal time!

I hope that you enjoy teaching this week of instruction as much as I did!

Sixth Grade Wonders: Drumbeat of Freedom, Unit 1 Week 2

 This Reading-Writing Workshop selection in Unit 1, Week 2 is a strong story. When I used it in a co-taught setting, though, I needed to add some more activities to allow for differentiation and some small group meetings. Over several years I added and refined these activities. Here they are, ready for you to use in your own classroom this year!

Speed Drill, Multiple Choice Questions, and Story Map

I still like using speed drills to increase student automaticity and fluency. Not only do speed drills help students to recognize words, but they also give us a chance to talk about word meanings that might be new for them.

I also wrote some multiple choice questions in the style of the questions used on the Weekly Assessments. These questions proved useful for small group work, as we could talk together about the questions and possible answers. Students are much more willing to share their thinking when talking to five others as opposed to talking with the entire class! For the Part A and Part B questions, I learned that some of my students really didn't know what to look for, and this allowed me to target instruction to help them with this.

Finally, I added a story map and list of events for students to work on. I really like giving students lists of events from a story to read and sequence. No matter what the age, this activity helps students to think about how a story unfolds. Students can also use the given events to help them write a short summary of the story, or create an illustrated plot diagram.

If you try these out, be sure to write a note and let me know!

Comparing Poems: A Look Back

 Time Warp: I originally wrote this blog post more than 10 years ago! As I was looking over past posts, I realized that I worked with the ideas in this post over this past year.

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As the last part of our quick unit on figurative language and poetry, the students and I spent the last week looking at how to compare poems and write paragraphs to share our comparisons.

Whew. It's a difficult process for students. On the one hand, students often spontaneous make comparisons as we move through poems--"That one reminds of me of..." or "This is just like..." However, to write successful comparison paragraphs, students need to learn how to do more thoughtful, thorough comparisons.

Using a chart
A chart is essential for helping students to compare poems. Sometimes people try to use Venn diagrams for this purpose. Venn diagrams are great for set theory and fun visual gags...but terrible for planning writing! A chart sets up the important criteria for what is to be compared. Because testing season is coming up, I told students that they won't be able to use a prepared chart for our state tests, but that they can make their own comparison charts.

It's interesting to watch students use the chart. When I model this for struggling readers, I work with one poem at a time. This kind of careful reading and analysis takes a lot of concentration, and struggling readers often have trouble with the attentional shifts needed to go back and forth between texts. On the other hand, strong readers often prefer to work in the opposite way. They thrive on the extra challenge of going back and forth between texts and often create strong insights, seeing differences in the ways that the author developed the topics. (2024 update: As I work with gifted and enrichment students, I now see how much our strong readers love to work on topics like this! It's an easy way to add differentiation.)

Do we have to fill out the whole thing? That's the beauty of it--I tell students that we only need to fill in 4 or 5 blocks. We look for the criteria that are the most interesting for the poems that we have. Interestingly, kids always like to fill in the block for figurative language and sound devices!

Scaffolded response frame
A scaffolded response frame is useful for students who are still learning compare and contrast structure. Let's face it--this describes just about every elementary school writer! A nice middle level of scaffolding is to project the scaffolded response, but have students write their own responses.

Is it formulaic? Yup. Does it lead to scripted, formulaic writing? Some of the responses on the last assessment were the best that I've seen. Helping students with the topic sentence and the transitions freed up some processing space for them to do some deeper thinking about the texts. Kids used quotation marks to show where they were quoting from poems, using specific details, coming up with similarities that I hadn't considered. These are good things! (2024 update: When I did a similar activity with a group of gifted students, I expected that they would chafe against the formula of the frame. Nope! They wanted the frame even more than other students.)

Choosing Poems
This is the hardest part. It's tempting to stick with poems that have the same topic. But even poems with the same topic don't always make the best comparisons. Last week I chose two hawk poems. The whole lesson fell kind of flat--besides the same topic, the poems didn't really have anything interesting or compelling enough about them to spend a great deal of time talking about.

Two poems that worked very well were "Hello, Moon!" by Patricia Hubbell (found in Hey, You!: Poems to Skyscrapers, Mosquitoes, and Other Fun Things) and "The Moon's the North Wind's Cooky" by Vachel Lindsay. These poems both explored the changes in the moon in an interesting way, with lots of differences in the use of figurative language and structure to talk about.

(2024 note: To differentiate this for my enrichment students, I gave them poetry books and let them choose the poems to compare. This gave them a purpose to strategically read many poems and talk about them together.)

Comparing poems was an interesting and rigorous way to end our study of poetry...but I do think that we are all ready to go on to text structure next week!

Math Jigsaw Problems

 This year, I've been working with math enrichment groups in addition to my regular gifted classes. In math enrichment groups, I pull 10-20 students from a grade level to work on math problems together. It's a lot of fun, but not without some challenges.

One challenge is that the students are often very quiet! I know that some classroom teachers with chatty classes would see this as a very privileged kind of problem. However, when my goals for the enrichment session include getting students to construct and share viable arguments, this silence can be deafening. The students would be quiet for several reasons. Taken from different classes, they often didn't know each other very well. Some of the students would want to work quickly on their own, while others were more tentative. 

A colleague gave me a copy of the book Get it Together: Math Problems for Groups, Grades 4-12. This book has some great problems and worked well for my older students. However, cutting out the problems is a chore! I decided to create some of my own jigsaw problems.

Here's the idea:

• Problems are basic logic matrix problems, with coin amounts and change to add a math component
• Each student only gets one clue, requiring the students to talk together to solve
• A final problem challenges students to create their own clues
  
  
  

You can find a single problem here: Single Problem Jigsaw Problem Solving.

For all four problems and an answer key, click here: Jigsaw Problem Solving for Math Enrichment.

Teaching Tools and Texts

 I'm publishing text-only versions of some of my favorite texts that I've authored over at my new blog! Stop by to read some texts and see where to get the formatted and student-ready versions...or just print them and use them as they are. 

Hope to see you there!

https://teachingtoolsandtexts.blogspot.com/

Figurative Language in Expository Text

 Do your students struggle to analyze figurative language in expository text? Mine certainly do! For intermediate readers who are already having trouble with content-specific vocabulary and new concepts in expository text, analyzing figurative language is yet another big challenge. 

But being able to understand how and why authors are using this figurative language is vital for deeper comprehension. Often, a single simile is used to convey a big idea about a new topic. Examples of personification are used to show nuances. A pithy metaphor in the introduction pops up again in the conclusion. In all of these instances, being able to identify and understand the figurative language adds to the deeper meaning.

Sometimes, well-meaning teachers spend too much time in the identification phase and not enough time in the analysis phase. It's easy to see why! Struggling students can pick out the words "like" or "as" and say with confidence, "That's a simile." It feels like you are being successful. However, when asked to analyze similes, these same students might fall back on using the exact same words from the text instead of elaborating on the simile and putting it in the context of the key concepts from the text.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you plan to analyze figurative language in expository text.

And, if you'd like a ready-made resource perfect for sixth graders, try this: Figurative Language in Expository Text. Available as a printable and digital resource, this text includes practice with analysis, a fluency activity, and more. It is the perfect supplement to Wonders Sixth Grade Unit 1, Week 4.