Distinguishing Main Idea from Theme
Friday, March 4th, 2011

Fiction does more than simply entertain the reader. Fiction is also instructional. Authors attempt to teach the reader a valuable lesson through a story's theme. Theme in fiction is not explicit or literal, it's an inference the author makes. [read more...]

Helping Students Identify the Main Idea of Any Text
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

When teaching students about main idea, scaffold your instruction. Students need to first learn how to identify the concrete and literal before they can determine the inferential. Here's a series of skills to slowly work through with your readers. [read more...]

Writing Simple Summaries and Determining Main Idea
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Some students struggle to summarize what they've read. They can tell you lots of specific details that were within the reading, but they can't explain the big idea, what the reading was all about. To work on summarization with her students, Kate Bieker has developed two fantastic ideas. [read more...]

Thinking Beyond the Details to Identify the Theme
Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Students need to read for close-up, tiny details, but they also have to think beyond the text and make inferences. We need to help students learn to draw conclusions and identify the bigger picture, the main idea, or the theme. To get kids [read more...]

Determining the Important Information
Monday, December 7th, 2009

When you ask students to tell you what a reading passage was about, it’s not uncommon for kids to just start rattling off tiny little details. Two ways to combat this problem is to introduce the “fist list” and 911 Retelling. [read more...]

Use Songs to Target Main Idea
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

After listening to the lyrics, Susie Allen has her students brainstorm what they think the title of the song is. They consider what the message of the song is and what it is mostly about. Of course, then the class compares their main idea title to the [read more...]

Create Simple Summaries with Pyramids
Friday, April 24th, 2009

I’ve shared the idea of Information Pyramids previously. It’s one of my favorite strategies for getting students to summarize a main idea and to include some specific supporting details. Since sharing it, many teachers have told me of their successes with it. So I am referencing [read more...]