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If teaching main idea isn’t going to help boost your students’ test scores, you might wonder why you should cover it at all? But the truth is, this skill works behind the scenes as a foundation, and is one of the most crucial elements for overall reading comprehension.
Today, we’re looking at 16 tips to make teaching main idea to your students easier and to see why teaching this skill matters, even if it’s not directly reflected in test results.
[Why is it difficult to teach students to find the main idea?](id-why)
According to author and literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, finding the main idea in a text or passage isn’t really a literacy skill. He makes this claim because the main idea is specific to each text. It’s not the same as other literacy skills that students can practice through repetition or even memorization because they’ll never have the same main idea twice.
This makes it harder for you to teach students HOW to do this correctly. It’s not like a mathematical formula. They can’t do a repetitive process and get the “correct” answer every time. Luckily, there are tips and strategies you can use to help your students find the main idea of a text with less confusion.
Main idea vs. Everything? What’s the difference?
Another reason it’s difficult for students to understand what a main idea is and find it in a text is because there are so many other literary synonyms out there that might confuse them. Here’s a quick breakdown of similar terms and how they’re different from the main idea:
[Main idea vs. Topic](id-topic)
The topic of a text is what it’s about. This if often just one or two words. In contrast, the main idea is what the author wants you to know or believe about that topic. Let’s look at the article “Kids are abuzz with activities to help save bees” to better understand the difference.
The topic of this article is saving bees. That’s what the text is about. The main idea is that three students are creating bee-friendly habitats to improve the bee decline. That is what this author specifically wants the reader to know about saving bees.
Main idea vs. Central idea
Many people may use the terms main idea and central idea interchangeably. While you can do that, it may be helpful for students if you make a distinction between the two.
Use “main idea” when talking about fiction or creative works, like poetry. Use “central idea” when talking about informational texts. This isn’t a requirement, and you can use these terms as synonyms, but younger students especially may benefit from a distinction between them.
[16 tips for teaching the main idea to your students](id-tips)
Because the main idea can be a difficult concept to teach (and understand!) not every strategy works for every student, text, or lesson. Here are some options you can use throughout the year to help your students practice finding the main idea to make the concept easier to understand:
1. Start with topics
Before you even have students pick up a text, start with a lesson or refresher on identifying the topics of a text. This can be as simple as doing an activity where students have to find the common bond between a few items or ideas.
For older students, you could play a game like “Tribond” where you provide three statements and students try to figure out what they have in common. For example, you could ask them what Penguins, Panthers, and Bruins all have in common. They’re all hockey team names (and animals, too!).
For younger students, try a mystery bag activity. Add three or four small items or images with a theme to a paper bag. Call on students to take turns pulling items out of the bag and work together to try to decide what they have in common.
For example, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and dental floss all have teeth or tools to clean your teeth in common. These activities help students think about how items and ideas relate to each other, which is a large part of being able to find and state the main idea.
After students understand how to identify topics, you can help them use the same thought process while reading to find connections in the text. You can write these potential topics on the board or have students record them in a notebook. Circle the ones that feel most important or relevant to the text.
Then you can model how they should think about which one is the right starting point for their main idea. Ask questions like, What is the author saying about these topics? or How can we write a sentence that describes what this text is about, using our topic as a guide?
2. Introduce main idea with pictures
Before jumping into a text, try teaching how to identify the main idea with pictures. Show images from picture books, textbooks, or even pictures of famous, student-appropriate artwork and ask them what the picture is mostly about.
This strategy provides a concrete way for students to understand the concept of main idea without the barrier of decoding written texts. It’s helpful for your youngest students who are still learning to read, struggling readers of any age, and English language learners (ELLs).
3. Teach about the main idea and key details together
The main ideas and key details go together like peanut butter and jelly. Students can’t find the main idea if they can’t identify key details. They can’t determine what information is a key detail if they don’t have a main idea to connect them all.
Instead of teaching these skills in isolation, teach them together. This can help students scaffold the thinking, research, and analysis skills necessary to make meaning from the texts they read.
4. Teach the main idea as part of summarizing
Because of the potential subjective nature of this skill, Shanahan recommends teaching it as part of a larger reading strategy like summarizing. Summarizing helps support students’ reading comprehension by giving them a full overview of a text, either paragraph by paragraph or holistically after reading.
It’s easier for students to look at a group of shorter summaries, such as one for each paragraph, and decide which details are MOST important, the ones that make up the one-sentence main idea.
Encourage students to paraphrase the text in their own words rather than requoting it exactly as printed. This can help them prepare them for other writing activities as they advance through school.
5. Vary the types of texts you use
Since the main idea is specific to whatever text you’re reading, it’s important to help students find the main idea in different types of texts.
Use both literary and informational texts in your lessons. Anything goes: poems, short stories, essays, novels, news articles, speech transcripts. Variations in length, difficulty, and topic give students a wide range of content for practice.
Newsela Knack:Newsela ELA’s content library has 18,000+ pieces of literary and informational texts on topics that align with your curriculum, students interests, and everything in between. It’s perfect for providing text variety to help students learn how to spot the main idea.
6. Pay attention to how you model finding the main idea
Shanahan recommends what he calls, “the gradual release of responsibility” when teaching about finding the main idea. When modeling the process, you start by explicitly telling students what to do. Then you pass the decision-making responsibility to them as you practice and repeat the process. Here’s what this might look like when doing multiple read-alouds:
First lesson: “We can cross out any extraneous details the author provides? They won’t help us find the main idea.”
Next lesson: “How can we cut down the information in this paragraph to make it easier to summarize?”
Later lesson: “We’ve just read this paragraph, now what should we do?”
Modeling the right thinking and then giving more responsibility to your students allows them to start finding the main idea independently in any text, not just the ones you cover in class.
Newsela Knack:Annotations can help with modeling, especially when you ask students to highlight key details or remove extraneous ones to help them summarize.
7. Ask guiding questions
While modeling, you can also prompt students with guiding questions to push them to think about the information included in the main idea. Ask questions like:
What is the text mostly about?
What is the author specifically telling us about this topic?
What does the author want us to know or believe about this topic?
What is the big idea from this section?
8. Add visuals to the text
Adding visuals to written text can help make ideas stick. If your text has little or no images, you can add some to help students connect the words with a tangible concept.
When modeling how to find the main idea, you can use free stock images with fair use copyright to illustrate key points of a text. If images aren’t available for the text or topic you’re covering, you can ask students to draw their own illustrations.
Another option is to create visual aids like anchor charts to make the concept even more tangible. Try an ice cream cone anchor chart where the main idea is the cone and key details are the scoops. Or you can use a pizza anchor chart analogy where the shell is the main idea and the toppings are key details. You can co-create these anchor charts with students to help them build ownership and understanding.
9. Look at the first and last sentences for clues
The topic and conclusion sentences in a text can be good starting points for identifying the main idea. They often include as least some clues to the theme, topic, main characters, primary conflict, or resolution.
As a pre-reading activity, have students read both the topic and conclusion sentence of the text and predict what they think the text will be about. Have students write down their predictions and after reading they can use key details from the text to support or disprove their predictions.
10. Use titles to your advantage
The title of the text or article can also provide clues to the main idea. You can do another pre-reading activity and have students read the title and predict what they think the text is about.
They can use that information after reading—with the key details they find in the text—to determine the main idea. If a text has headings and subheadings you can include these in your pre-reading activity, too.
11. Use keywords
Some texts include keywords or key terms as a text feature. These words and phrases are bolded, italicized, underlined, or otherwise stand out from the rest of the text so students know they’re important.
Analyzing and reviewing keywords and their definitions can help draw students’ attention to what’s important in a text. You can also have students find synonyms and antonyms for the keywords throughout the passage. Looking for repeated references can help students recognize some of the important topics in a text.
Newsela Knack:Newsela ELA Power Words work like dynamic keywords to highlight Tier III vocabulary words for students, providing background knowledge and context.
12. Use main idea prompts
If students aren’t sure where to begin when writing a main idea sentence, they may feel overwhelmed. You can use a fill-in-the-blank prompt activity to get them started, which may feel less intimidating than creating a main idea from scratch. Before reading, provide students with prompts like:
The most important thing to know about [TOPIC] is [KEY DETAIL].
[TOPIC] is [RESULT] because [KEY DETAIL].
The main idea of [TOPIC] is [KEY DETAIL].
[CHARACTER] wanted [RESULT], but [PROBLEM], so [KEY DETAIL] then [RESOLUTION].
The prompt or prompts you choose may depend on whether you’re using an informational or literary text and the complexity of the lesson.
13. Provide main idea choices
A text only has one main idea. But literacy skills aren’t math and there isn’t always one right answer. We can use that variety to our advantage when teaching students about the main idea.
Do an exercise where you have students read a passage or a text and give them four potential main ideas. Depending on how long you’ve been practicing the skill, you could also ask them to generate four potential main ideas of their own. Next, have students number the four statements in the following convention:
Too broad: This main idea isn’t specific enough.
Too narrow: This main idea is too specific and is a detail instead.
Too many details: This main idea has too many supporting details. It’s a summary.
Main idea: This is the main idea of this text.
This activity can help students sort through their ideas of what they think a main idea might be while visually seeing how to narrow the information down to just the highlights.
14. Make a reading-writing connection
Explicitly tie finding the main idea to writing a topic sentence, especially for older students or struggling older readers. Show students that their main idea statements are essential topic sentences in their own writing, supported by details.
Not only can this help students build strategies for finding the main idea in texts, it can also help them better focus their own writing to make it more clear and targeted.
15. Take advantage of online resources
Incorporate interactive online tools and games that reinforce the concept of main idea. Matching games, quizzes, or checks for understanding where students pair supporting details with the main idea are all helpful suggestions.
Formative Fact: Try creating an interactive main idea activity or practice set with Formative! Sign up for free today.
16. Review, review, review
The more you practice, the easier anything gets. You can have students find the main idea of any text you read as a class, or even reading that they do independently. The more opportunities you provide for practice and encourage them to do it on their own, the more they’ll internalize the steps needed to master the skill.
Newsela Knack:The standards and skill-aligned multiple-choice quizzes on all Newsela authentic texts make it easier for you to discover what your students know and where they need more help practicing this skill.
[How can I make my main idea lessons and activities more accessible for diverse learners?](id-accessible)
Every classroom has diverse learners. Differentiating instruction and addressing common challenges can make it easier for you to teach main idea to your students and, most importantly, make the concept stick for them. Here are some strategies you can try to make main idea lessons more accessible:
Focus on multimodal learning
Your students have different ways that they prefer to take in and retain information. Incorporate multimodal learning into your lesson plans to help the strategies and skills resonate with all types of learners:
Visual: Use diagrams, anchor charts, videos, or infographics to teach and enhance main idea skills.
Auditory: Use read-alouds, audiobooks, and videos with sound to provide alternatives to written text.
Readers: Offer a variety of texts, provide detailed written instructions for activities, and encourage detailed note-taking or using graphic organizers.
Hands-on: Choose activities that can include hands-on components, role-playing, or opportunities for movement.
Try flexible grouping
Create small groups based on ability levels or preferred learning mode to provide more focused instruction and allow students to work together to better understand how to find the main idea.
Differentiate content and materials
Modify the complexity of information or present it in different formats to make it more accessible for all students. Try text leveling to allow students to read the text at different difficulty levels to practice finding the main idea without worrying about having to decode complex words.
You can also guide students with chunked texts and highlight repeated words or phrases that often point to the main idea.
Newsela Knack:Level texts from anywhere on Newsela ELA with Luna, you AI-powered assistant!
Support every lesson with background knowledge
Preteach new vocabulary words and build context before you dive into a new text. Help students better understand the themes and context of the text so it's easier for them to locate the main idea and key details.
Newsela Knack:Try our Novel and Book Studies Collection, included with Newsela ELA. It uses articles, videos, primary sources, and other resources to help build background knowledge on themes and key plot points of popular books and novels.
Incorporate home languages
Allow students to discuss main ideas in their home language before sharing their thoughts and ideas in English. You can use your flexible groups to pair students that share the same home language to allow them this discussion time before sharing their ideas with the whole class.
Newsela Knack:Provide paragraph-by-paragraph translations in over 40 languages with Luna, plus access our whole-article, human-reviewed Spanish translations on many of our 18,000+ texts.
Teach main idea with Newsela ELA
Although the main idea is a unique skill, it's easier to teach and track student progress when you have the right scaffolds and support for both you and your students.
With Newsela ELA, it’s easy to provide literary and informational texts to help students find the main idea with a variety of relevant, real-world content. Not a Newsela customer yet? Sign up for Newsela Lite to start your 45-day free trial and access to content and skill-building scaffolds you need to teach students how to find the main idea in your lessons.
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