Teaching and Practicing Main Idea

Our school threw our 2nd annual Harvest Festival on Friday! This new tradition is my favorite. I love seeing the kids after school ad having so much fun. The first boom we read this year was from the Bailey School Kids series, Vampires Don’t Wear Polkadots. I always start the year by reading books from all different series to get them hooked. Now that we’ve had the experience of reading this book together my kids often refer to my teacher look and how they picture Mrs. Jeepers having the exact same look. I wanted to dress up, but it was one of those weeks with the best intentions and all sorts of overwhelmed so it just didn’t happen. Maybe next year, though.

For the last couple of weeks we have bee working on main idea. As usual I started with an anchor chart. This is not my original creation. I found it floating around Pinterest and why try to reperfect something that’s already perfect?

As we’re working with articles and books we refer back to this chart and look for clues.

I read The Important Book. This is THE most perfect book for introducing and practicing main idea. It takes it to the most basic level

We read the book and together practiced identifying the topic, supporting details and main idea.

Once we developed some confidence I used this resource created by The Brown Bag Teacher.

The activity was rigorous and the kids worked really hard. With help they were all successful, but I have to admit the reading was a bit hard for them. I knew it might be because these were designed for 5th graders. The activity was so great though and the conversations that were happening helped me realize that I needed to adjust this to an independent level for them. So if you have 4th or 5th graders this is a must have. Check out her other main idea goodies while you’re there too. Click the picture below to see more.

Next we practiced reading passages and identifying the main idea and supporting details. This is without a doubt one of my all time “well worth every penny” TpT purchases! There are so many passages to choose from, they are perfect for third graders and I love love love that they are non-fiction!!! We worked on a few together, a few with a partner an then finally a few independently.