Main Idea / Theme

Mr. Greninger and Ms. Leom are both looking at making EVERY MINUTE of the day effective and preparing students for our MCAs (state tests in Reading in Math). Starting next week, Mr. Greninger will be pulling fifteen extra minutes from Science for extra Math teaching and practice. Ms. Leom already teaches and has students practice reading and comprehension skills in Social Studies. Both teachers have been using morning work time to focus on specific skills.

For the Reading test, a big portion of the test is for students to successfully determine the main idea or theme of their writing in addition to comprehension skills. We use main idea for nonfiction texts and theme for fiction texts. The change to Common Core has a stronger focus on nonfiction texts, so we have invested more time in nonfiction. For the past few weeks, students have read an article every morning for morning work and answered questions. Many times the questions reflect other testing skills; such as, fact and opinion, compare and contrast, cause and effect, setting, and more. When class starts, we reread the article together, discuss the questions, eliminating the obvious choices and discuss the answers we select. Then, we've been working on the main idea and the theme. 

Ms. Leom does "think alouds" to model our steps ... "I am thinking about ..."
We start by looking at the title.
We look at key words and phrases that are repeated throughout.
We read the first and last lines of the article.
We find the introductory paragraph (tells us what the article is about) and closure paragraph (ties up and rewords the article). The middle paragraphs are the detail paragraphs. For the details (in figuring out the main idea), you try to reword the detail paragraph in one sentence.
Then we look at our three (or more) detail sentences to determine our conclusion.

We spent over two weeks working on main idea together on the board. Ms. Leom has given a few opportunities to practice independently. It gives her feedback about ways we can improve and what she needs to reteach and model. For example, for the main idea, "it is about (insert topic here)" isn't specific enough or "facts about (insert topic here)" needs more specific terms and words from the article. This week, students started thinking aloud and completing the main idea on the board. We will continue to practice in the coming weeks.

Here is an example of today's practice with one of the classes.

It is exciting to listen and watch our progress. More and more students are successfully and confidently participating in our daily practice.