Teaching Main Idea in Reading Comprehension

Identifying main idea is a core reading strategy for comprehension.

Teaching main idea? Get main idea worksheets and activities, a sure-fire video for teaching reading comprehension main idea and printable graphic organizers.

The main idea is who or what the story is all about. This is the most important information.


One of the most difficult aspects of teaching main idea is to recognize if it is being explicitly stated or inferred.

Guided reading lessons and reading comprehension worksheets can help.

Main Idea Activities

• 1. Identifying the key words of a sentence
• 2. Identifying key words or topic of a paragraph
• 3. Identifying the topic sentence of a paragraph
• 4. Recognizing an explicitly stated main idea of a paragraph
• 5. Inferring the main idea of a paragraph
• 6. Recognize relationships among main ideas in related paragraphs in longer selections
• 7. Inferring relationships among main ideas in related paragraphs in longer selections

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Identify Key Words
This is very literal comprehension. Use a small, sample sentence to identify key words.

The small dog was frightened by the big, bad wolf.

In this example, the question, "What is the sentence about?" is that it is about a small dog. What about that small dog? It is frightened by the wolf. While this seems very simple, many students who cannot grasp the concept of a main idea need this step and cannot move on without it. Mastery at the sentence level is essential.

Once mastery at the sentence level is shown, move on to identifying key words of a paragraph. Do not put the words into a sentence yet. Just highlight important words and discuss what they mean within the paragraph.


Explicitly Stated Main Idea
In the primary grades, these are the two points students are generally expected to master. The main idea, or topic, is still explicitly stated. Teach the students to ask, "What does the author say?" and, "Why does he say it?"

Be sure your students are familiar with paragraph structure before teaching the procedures to identify the main idea.

Either read a paragraph out-loud or direct them to read it carefully. Then:

• Write a phrase together about what each sentence says
• Identify the one idea that all of the sentences say
• Write the main idea in a complete sentence using your own words
• Find the sentence that best sounds like your complete sentence

The beauty of this is that it is teaching the students to monitor their own comprehension. You are also teaching that the main idea can be found anywhere within a paragraph, not just at the beginning.



Inferencing
This is actually quite similar to steps 3 & 4, except that now the students will need to match their "own words" main idea with an implied one from the text - inferencing. Continue using the same four steps but at higher levels of thinking.

Inferencing is the critical step towards mastering reading comprehension. Along with fluency, it is an excellent predictor of future reading success.

The Florida Center for Reading Research has many activities for teaching main idea.

Main Idea Worksheets

Students start with locating main idea sentences that go with specific details.


Next, teach them to write the main idea as a question for reading comprehension paragraphs.

After that they locate the main idea of a paragraph structure through inferencing, and finally writing a paragraph using given details while writing their own main idea, or topic, sentence.

Perfect for the essential reading comprehension skill of how to find the main idea! Click on the apple to get your free copy.

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