How to Actually TEACH Main Idea

Hello and welcome back to this series of “How to Actually Teach Reading Comprehension.” For more topics such as this one, I’d love for you to sign up for my monthly “How to Actually Teach” newsletters found HERE.

Today’s topic is all about teaching Main Idea.

This tends to be a very difficult topic for students, and even some adults! I always teach Main Idea before I teach Summarizing because the main idea is a crucial first step of summarizing. Here’s how I explain the difference: Main Idea is the Most Important point of the story or paragraph. It is often just one sentence and sometimes the very first sentence of a paragraph. We’ll talk about teaching summarizing next month but you can see from the visual below how the Main Idea is a critical first step of understanding the summary (this is why it’s important not to skip ahead)!

I then provide examples of what this actually looks like. Remember, many of our students learn when visuals are paired with auditory information, so simply stating definitions might not work. Here’s a page of some examples and then I go on to have students identify main ideas vs. summaries.

The next part is putting all this information into practice. Here’s a few ideas of what I do:

Give students a book title and ask them what they think the story will be about
Provide students a brief summary of a book/story and ask them to come up with an appropriate title.
Using Venn Diagrams, read a story, stopping at each paragraph and ask students to identify a key sentence in that paragraph. Looking at all the sentences together, what is the main idea (most important thing) this story is communicating?
Read a story, stopping at each paragraph and try to identify sentences that do not support the main idea of the story.

These are all activities I do when teaching main idea to my students. As always, they are all included in My Leveled Intervention Binder found at the bottom of this post if you are interested in finding out more!