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!

Analyzing Paragraphs for Main Ideas

   I'm well into another school year, one that brings new challenges and opportunities. This year, my district has adopted Wonders as the core program, so I'm back to teaching from a basal series. I'm not going to really say any more about it right now as I'm not sure how I feel.

  In Week 3 of the series, we are teaching about finding main ideas. (Teaching readers how to find main ideas in a text is one of those skills that follows me everywhere I go.) It's so interesting to see how sixth graders approach the task versus how fourth graders approach it. Sixth graders are capable of much more complex thinking and detailed analysis of main ideas.

Because of this, I decided to use a teaching method that I had developed back when I last taught sixth grade. In this method, readers analyze each sentence and consider the role that each sentence plays in the paragraph as a whole. It is a task that fourth graders found quite difficult. I was curious--what would sixth graders think?

I wanted to share this lesson, so I had to write the paragraphs myself. Because I didn't want to unconsciously make the paragraph too easy, I spread out the writing and research over several days. The topic relates to the Week 3 reading selection that students will soon face, equipping them with some background knowledge as they also analyze sentences.

The lesson begins with discussing the roles of sentences in a paragraph:

The first two kinds of sentences are pretty typical. The third, however, refers to those sentences that exist in a paragraph for stylistic purposes. I find it's important to address these sentences, both from a reader's perspective and an author's perspective. From a reader's perspective, there are definitely sentences in a paragraph that don't add information and don't state a main idea. We need a way to categorize them! From a writer's perspective, it's always helpful to look at examples of how an author makes information more friendly to a reader.

Next, students read the paragraph. I have a wide range of reading levels in my room so I used this as an opportunity to do some fluency modeling and choral reading--I read each sentence aloud, and students repeated it to me.

Our next task was to look at each sentence individually and consider its role. It's okay to skip sentences for the time being and look at others. Check out the first sentence, for example--this one names the topic of the paragraph and could end up being the topic sentence, so we decided to leave it aside for the moment.

With each sentence, my question was, "Does EVERY sentence in the paragraph relate back to an idea from this one?" Sixth graders should be able to easily categorize sentences 3, 4, 5, and 6 as detail sentences. This leads to the question--what is the topic of the paragraph? Students may be quick to shout out, "The D2!" However, the topic is a little more than that. The entire paragraph is about the technology of the D2. Point out to students that the paragraph doesn't describe what the D2 looks like, or who made it. Every sentence relates somehow to the technology of the rover.

By the end, we were left with the first or the last sentence as the topic sentence. You can definitely see how the first sentence is attractive. However, does it really show the main idea of the entire paragraph? It does not, which led students to decide that it was a Transition/Style paragraph: "It helps the reader to see what the paragraph will be about." This left us with the last sentence as the topic sentence.

As students worked on a second paragraph in their groups, I heard some great conversations going on. "That's more of a detail; that can't be the main idea," and "That last sentence--it wraps things up, but it doesn't show the main idea," were some of my favorite comments. At the end, students reflected on their learning and noted that the first sentence is not always the main idea, that main idea sentences can be tricky, and that there are sometimes sentences that are so exciting and interesting that they lead readers away from main ideas.

Was this method worthwhile for sixth graders? It was! Putting the information in a chart format really helped students to focus on each sentence individually. The conversations that students had were meaningful and led readers to the heart of comprehension.

You can read more about the Okeanos Expedition here. If your students want to see the D2 Rover up close, here is a video showing its launch.

Main Ideas, Topics, and...Photographs?

    This week, I found that I could build visual skills, questioning, and inferring even with a very traditional topic/main idea activity.

    As you can see from these paragraphs, right now we are looking at topics and main ideas. These are not the same at the all. Topics are best expressed in just a few words. Main ideas express a main point about a topic, and are always in complete sentences.

    Readers need to see lots of different paragraph examples, with main ideas in different places. Looking at multiple paragraphs with related topics helps students to see how topics and main ideas can be expressed in different ways. In these paragraphs, students also saw how paragraphs can have a sentence that doesn't belong.

Photos, Close Reading, and Details

  Okay, this is all the basic stuff. Kids really do need to have these experiences with paragraphs, and they are meaningful. But the lesson didn't really get exciting until I started showing some skink photos from my personal archive.

   "Look carefully at this photograph. Based on evidence from the text, what inference can you make about this skink?" I asked students.

    I didn't have to beg or cajole them to look back--they were flipping through their pages, scanning the sentences, eagerly searching for the detail that they remembered. "It must be a young skink!" one student said. "Look, it says here in the text..."
    
    Oh, the explicit text reference--that's totally what I want to see and hear! In the next picture, students first had to use some clues to figure out if the skink was on a wall or on the ground. "As you can clearly see, this is a floor mat," one student said--he definitely has a future as a prosecutor! 

   We went on to look at more pictures of skinks, talking about how sentences from the text can explain or describe them. In this conversation, students were:

-Using close reading to find details
-Making inferences as they matched text details to visual details
-Asking questions

   It all shows how a simple lesson about main ideas and topics can become so much more! 

   You can easily do this with your own paragraphs and photos. Why not try some paragraphs about your school? Consider the animals that are popular in your classroom right now--or a question that came up in science class. 


The skink texts are available as part of this product.

Teaching Main Ideas

Looking for classroom-ready lessons and activities for teaching about main ideas? Check here: Main Ideas and Details in Nonfiction Text

So this year I thought that I could take a shortcut through the Land of Main Ideas. My idea of a shortcut was one quick lesson, authentic note-taking about Antarctica, create our own main ideas, and emerge with full mastery.

Looking back, this shortcut idea was a big mistake. After all, I know all about how students understand (or fail to understand!) main ideas. I know that students often pay attention to individual sentences, processing text at the micro-level instead of putting together the macro-structure of the text. I know that students are easily led astray by seductive details. I know that students confuse topics with main ideas. I know that the same students who can pick out explicit main ideas in a paragraph can struggle with finding implicit main ideas. (I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Retelling.)

So, trying to teach main ideas in one lesson was not a good idea.

Once I realized my mistake, I stepped back to observe what students were doing. A card sorting activity proved to be a great way to find out what students were thinking--they had to put together a paragraph and select the sentence that states the main idea. I noticed that students were drawn to whichever sentence should come first in a paragraph, even if the sentence is a question, and seemed to struggle with the role of a main idea in a paragraph. (You can find this activity as part of this unit.)

Topics and Main Ideas
Next we looked at some paragraphs and found topics and main ideas with the help of a PowerPoint. (You can find it here.) I really like using PowerPoint to illuminate text and show students key ideas. In this particular example, notice how the PowerPoint makes the topic of the paragraph jump right out at students. And for teachers who are sure that their students have already mastered this, I challenge you to give it a try. You may be surprised at how far students can get without having a true grasp on topics. I wrote a book about it and for some reason I still find it shocking, every year. Maybe you will learn a little faster than I have.

Identified Main Ideas
Instead of jumping right into having students identify main ideas, I showed them several paragraphs that had the main idea underlined. Then I challenged them to make a generalization about where the main idea can be found in a paragraph. If you know fourth graders, you know that making generalizations about text can be tough for them. Many tried to answer with information about the wood thrush, confusing the text at hand with the abstract idea of text. If this happens to you (and it probably will), just remember that it takes students time and practice to talk about texts in the abstract. But every new experience adds to their background knowledge for next time.

You may notice that these examples are usually about animals, and that there are multiple paragraphs about one topic. My students love animals and are always motivated to read about local creatures they may see. Using real topics instead of the "fluffy" topics that proliferate in worksheets keeps our work with main idea from devolving back into the worksheets or color-coded SRA cards of yesteryear. I always end the lessons with a video or photo (sometimes from my own personal collection!) of the animals in the paragraphs.


Implicit Main Ideas
Our next step was to jump into creating main ideas for texts with implied main ideas. Fourth graders really struggle with these tasks, but they are so important. In fact, I think that creating a main idea sentence for a set of given details is one of the most important skills for students to develop. This is a lifelong skill that transcends reading and writing.

Looking at paragraphs with implied main ideas and talking about what the main idea could be helps students to consider the gist of a set of sentences. In this paragraph, notice how all of the sentences relate to the movement of the fairy shrimp. Movement and other abstract nouns are vital for academic reading and writing, but not frequently used in speaking. Exposure and practice help students to weave these kinds of words into their writing.

Generating Topic Sentences
Our next step was to write a topic sentence for a paragraph. Yes, it's test preparation, but it is worthwhile. Students really need to be able to do this! Strong readers will breeze right through an activity like this, especially as the pictured example has such a transparent main idea. However, struggling readers will have difficulty. They may write a topic sentence that relates only to one kind of skink. Circling the different kinds of skinks in the paragraph is a way to scaffold their learning.



Assessing Understanding
I'm not talking about student understanding here--I'm talking about my own. What did I learn from my longer-than-expected-journey through the Land of Main Ideas?
-Helping students to identify and generate main ideas is vitally important and may take more time than expected.
-Practice with finding topics and main ideas is worthwhile work, and I can keep it from just being boring worksheet practice by incorporating topics of interest and real-life links.
-Even strong readers may need explicit lessons with topics and main ideas--and that's okay.

Revisiting Poems with a Poetry Collection

    When planning for poetry, it's worth the time investment to put together a core set of poems. This can be as simple as a stapled packet, or more elaborate as a small book bound with a plastic comb binding.

   As I have worked through poetry over the last few weeks, I've given students class time here and there to read the poems in their booklets. As we learn new concepts, I get to hear them talk about familiar poems in new ways. Revisiting the same poems again and again helps students to realize that there are layers of meaning within poems, layers that may not be apparent on a first read.

    For example, on Friday, I taught about similes. Then the students scattered throughout the room, on a mission to find five similes to share with the class. "Look! There is a simile in this one!" a student said, bringing me Sea Fever. Other students were surprised to find the simile in "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star"--a simile that they have probably sung since they were small children, but never noticed.

    Some of the poems in my poetry collection are included in our Readers Theatre scripts, which students are preparing to present on Tuesday. "Classroom Creature is a simile," one student said. "That's the poem that I'm reading for our scripts." Now, the poem in question is actually an extended metaphor comparing a pencil sharpener to a creature. But this observation, and the student's familiarity with the poem, allowed us to have the simile versus metaphor conversation pretty early. How great!

  Putting together a poetry collection to share with your class is a pretty easy task, and well worth the time investment. I have one already formatted for copying available in my Figurative Language packet, but you could easily make your own. Choose poems that show a wide variety of techniques, from simple and familiar nursery rhymes to more complex and thoughtful poems. Over the weeks of your poetry unit, you will be able to see students revisit poems to find new meanings and new techniques.

Notes
-Our thank you letters unit is chugging along nicely! This week, the students loved taking sentences that were written formally and rewriting them informally. I've never seen this level of writing control in fourth graders before. Daily Sentences are now in a folder on Google Drive. If you are interested in viewing them, write to me with the Gmail address and I'll add you to the permissions.
-As I am working on poetry, I'm beginning to dust off my nonfiction introduction unit, looking at which materials I want to use and which I want to adjust. If you are headed in this direction, you may want to check out my book, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling, or my Main Ideas and Details Unit.


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Main Ideas: Two Ways, One Day

Today was our first day back to school after the holiday break.

Sigh.

I jumped right into the instruction, taking advantage of the mini-honeymoon period after the break to do some tough teaching. Today we looked at main idea from two different perspectives--creating details to support a main idea, and writing a main idea to fit the details.

Creating details to support a main idea
In writing class, students started writing paragraphs about their holiday break. They chose whether their holiday break was relaxing, eventful, or exciting. Then, they used a graphic organizer to collect details to support that main idea.

In this case, students were working from main idea to small details. (The entire lesson is free over at TeachersPayTeachers.) It went surprisingly easily. Students eagerly got to work, and were able to choose the details from their holiday break to support the main idea that they had chosen.






Writing a main idea to fit the details
In reading class, students went in the opposite direction. We've been researching various topics related to Antarctica. Today, students put together their notes and created main ideas based on the information they had collected.

I modeled the process with an example sheet that I had created. Here, we looked at the details. Red salamanders:

-Can be found under rocks
-Can be found under logs
-Build burrows underground
-Live in the water in winter

In typical fourth grade fashion, many students jumped into writing, "Where the red salamander lives."

"No," I said. "Remember, a main idea needs to be in a sentence! What is the sentence that you could write?"

"Um--this is about where the red salamander lives?"

It took a little bit of pulling teeth, but one student finally suggested, "Red salamanders live in different places." Great! This is definitely supported by the details. Another one said, "Red salamanders live under a variety of things." I liked this main idea sentence because every one of the details does relate to that idea of under, and the sentence showed that pretty nicely.

In the next example, students showed a little more independence. We read the details aloud and talked about how they all related to the appearance of the red salamander.

"What the red salamander looks like," one student wrote. I sighed, thought of the lost holiday break, and jumped in again. "Remember," I said, "A main idea needs to be stated in a sentence."

"The red salamander is colorful," another student wrote. This main idea is very much supported by the details--notice that all of the details have color words!

Some students noticed that the red salamander is not always red. They struggled with how to put this idea into words. After looking at various examples of a main idea, I modeled the use of the word despite.

Despite its name, the red salamander can be may different colors.

I'll be curious to see if the word despite makes its way into any of their finished reports!

Next, of course, the students will be using the same graphic organizer that they used for the holiday writing prompt to organize their research notes. Notice how this is the opposite of the first activity. Instead of choosing details to support a main idea, students will be crafting a main idea to fit the details.

Writing with main ideas in two different ways in one day--that day being the first one back from break--was actually easier than I thought. Both lessons strengthened one another. The message of supporting main ideas with details was clearly conveyed in two different ways.

And now it's just two more days until the weekend!