Do your kids struggle with main idea? Argh!!! I've found that it's always a challenge to come up with new ideas to help kids REALLY get it. This is one of the activities I use early on after my initial introduction of main idea. It's called...
Main Idea Brown Bags
There are 5 separate centers for this activity. Each one comes on a sheet of paper that you cut out and put into a brown bag. Print on cards stock and laminate if you want to be able to use it over and over. I always tend toward putting in the time up front because I KNOW it will save me time later on when I can just pull out my activities and go... only prep once!
Each center has one topic and 3 sentences. Students use what they know about the topic and the sentences to come up with the main idea. The centers get progressively more difficult from one to five. Here's bag one:
So students would assemble the puzzle and notice the topic is school. The sentences all tell about having fun in some way, shape or form. So they could conclude that the main idea of this paragraph would be... School is fun!
There is even a recording sheet of you wish to have students hand this in as an assessment.
Honestly, I have my kiddos write MOST of their work in their notebooks unless I'm looking to assess or use this to check their understanding. However, I do this activity in groups and walk around to monitor, so I find I get a pretty good feel for who has it and who doesn't without having them turn the work in.
What do you think? Do you have any tried and true main idea activities? Comment below!
-Interventionista
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