Main Idea

I RESOLVE to post my more in 2015!! ;)

We have only been back to school for 4 days (I am soooo lucky to have an entire month off for Winter Break)!!! In those 4 days we have been hitting it hard with Main Idea!! I have always found myself frustrated with teaching main idea, but this year it seems like 2nd time is the charm!

We started with this anchor chart:

It was short and simple. We can re-use it each time we read something that is Main Idea worthy! It will stay hanging in our room. We read an article on teaching Computer Science (coding) in classrooms from our Time 4 Kids magazine. Then we worked together to pick out the main idea and supporting details. We also threw in some close reading as we re-read the article each time looking for more and with a different purpose.

We followed that up with a worksheet for practice from this packet (click on the picture to go to the item):

This was a success! They did very well with it and I was able to see which students are still looking for a main topic vs a main idea! 

So the next day I broke out some more T4K magazines (I obviously don't get to them on a regular basis and have a stock pile. BUT they are great for Non-Fiction units!). We followed our close reading process and I read it aloud first. Then we picked apart the main idea and added it to our foldable. Then the students dug in to look for TEXT BASED EVIDENCE to support the main idea. Here is the foldables that we made! They did an excellent job and are really getting good with TBE. 

The article we used. Notice all the N-F Text Features :) 

My model

Again the model

Student sample (Main Idea in the middle- TBE on the flaps) Notice this student even references the line number!! Points on the TBE graph :) 

The finished product!

What is up next: More Main Idea Practice! I am going to have to dig even deeper to come up with more practice passages and activities, but I am sure I will come up with something. We are moving on next week to a project that ties together with our biography study and our NF Text Feature "review."

ONE day away from a three day weekend! Woo!