Summarizing Informational Texts: Using Main Ideas!

For the past few weeks, my job as a literacy coach has taken me into classrooms to support kids who are in need of some extra reading intervention. In the past, the model has been to pull these students out of the classroom, but the ore we pull kids out, the less they know what's going on, and they're often missing something important in the room. 
I have been working with kids in third, fourth, and fifth grade, and have really enjoyed it. It made me miss the classroom (for the most part!). 
After speaking with the teacher about what the students needed support in, we settled on some lessons about summarizing nonfiction. This is a difficult strategy for many students to apply. It requires them to identify the topic and then use that to determine what is important in each section of the text. Then we combine those important ideas into a complete summary. Here's what we did:

 We started out with a short text that I found at Readworks.org. There are lots of great passages about all different topics, in fiction and expository format on Readworks. And it's free!

I used a blank thinking guide from Fisher Reyna Education to help us focus on the topic, main idea of the article, and the main ideas of each paragraph.

First we previewed the text including the title, subtitle, and any images or nonfiction features. We made a prediction based on this evidence, and we read through the article once to confirm or adjust our predictions.

After we read through once, we discussed the topic of the article and recorded it on our sheets. We then read through one paragraph at a time to identify the main idea of each paragraph. To help students do this, I ask them to notice repeated ideas and to identify what idea is supported in all the sentences of a paragraph, or what the sentences have in common.

Once we had identified each main idea, we decided to bundle them. We read through paragraphs one and two and identified the common idea in both of them. Then we left paragraph three by itself, combined four and five into one main idea, and combined six and seven into another. We wrote a few words to identify what bundles we had made.

Students had been practicing writing open-ended summaries for weeks, so I thought I'd try a scaffolded response by providing some choices. I wrote four different versions of a summary for the article. One was complete and accurately represented all of the main ideas we identified. The others were either missing an important piece and overly represented a small detail, or misrepresented some information in the article.

On each choice, the students identified which main ideas were represented and which pieces were omitted. After they evaluated each one, they chose the summary that most accurately represented the important information in the article. 
For a whole class setting, I have provided each group with a different version of a summary and had the team evaluate it. Then they had to get up and present to the rest of the class to explain whether their summary was a great choice or a less-than-great choice.
I found that providing some answer choices for the kids to evaluate helped them make the connection to test-taking without having to do passage after passage! A simple activity like this at the end of a close reading could help kids practice this skill in an easy way.
To get the Thinking Guide and any other tools for helping students be successful through an understanding of genre, check out FisherReyna Education on TPT!
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Expository Text: Main Ideas Anchor Chart & our upcoming plans for third grade!

Main Idea is really hard. For third and fourth graders, anyway, it can be a challenge. Once, my class and I were reading a short text about Abraham Lincoln. It gave details about how he had to walk miles to school, when there was a school, and how he did his reading by candlelight. He had to chop firewood and do all sorts of difficult things to survive as a kid. 

As we were reading this, I could see how the students were reacting. "Wow," they were thinking. "Harsh."

So when I asked for the main idea, I was a little surprised at the idea they came up with. 

"Life was hard in the 1980s."

WHAT?! Ummm.... yeah, but not as hard as it was in the 1800s! 

Anyway, kids are goofy, so something we think they're getting the big idea, but they're missing an important piece of their comprehension. Like the century or something. 

To help students with main idea, we planned out a few lessons that we think will scaffold their learning. We're starting off with a hands-on activity like this one from Super Second Grade

See original post

Basically, students in groups get a bag with several items all connected to one idea. They have to identify the supporting details and then put them together to make a main idea. 

Teachers will use the understanding students acquired through this activity to make this anchor chart:

Then, we'll practice identifying the main ideas of an article. Teachers are going to use the Bamboo Bears article from the Austin ISD Language Arts Resources site as a source of text. The teacher will white out the subheading for each section and have students use the details in the section and the repeated ideas to create the main idea statement, or a new subheading.

Afterwards, they can check it against the original subheadings! It's a fun and engaging way to practice identifying the main idea!

To teach main idea using the gradual release model, check out my Reading Strategy Miniack: Main Ideas.

We're going to follow up with some tools from my Nonfiction Pack to help kids practice main idea in a variety of ways: sorting, graphic organizers, foldables, and more! Get all 65+ pages on sale this week for 5.00 on TPT!

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Nonfiction: Main Idea, Part 3

This is the third day of my main idea posts. Can you tell we've spent a lot of time on this idea? 

Her'e a strategy to practice main ideas. I've used it during Guided Reading. One of the nice things about our textbook adoption (not a big textbook user, BTW) is that it came with these leveled readers to use during guided reading. There are all different genres, too, so it actually supports our standards. I was working with a group of fifth grade kids when I did this lesson, but I've used it before with third and fourth graders. 

First, of course, we previewed & predicted about the text. 

This book is all about changes on Earth caused by different forces: water, weather, and plate movement in the Earth's crust.

In our small group, each child has a book and a post-it. We look at a paragraph at a time. This page was all about Landslides, as you can see by the heading and photograph/caption. I want kids to start using the features to predict what the section will be about, so we have a conversation. Then I have each student read on his/her own, but seated at the table with me.

As they read, they are instructed to find the 3-4 words that the paragraph is mostly about and record them on their post-its.  

After each student has recorded his/her words, we talk about which words we chose and why. This is an opportunity for students to revise their words. For example, while we were reading a paragraph that included a list of characteristics of weather, the words hot and cold came up. A couple students wrote "hot" and "cold" on their lists, using up two of their four words. 

Another student, however, wrote "temperature." This idea incorporated both hot and cold, as well as several other sentences in the text. Kids can become more evaluative in their choices and really think about determining the most important ideas represented in the text.

After kids get good at identifying the main ideas of paragraphs, we move into sections. Then, they write a main idea statement for each section and combine them to create a summary of their reading.

Hope that helps.
New on TPT and Teacher's Notebook, my ginormous Nonfiction Pack! I'm so excited about this pack. It's my biggest pack yet: over 60 pages of Nonfiction stuff!
Check it out at TPT and Teacher's Notebook!

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Nonfiction: If I say it ten times, it's probably IMPORTANT!

Yesterday, I shared a sample anchor chart to use for main idea. One of the tips to find main idea was to look for clues in repeated ideas. 
This is huge. If you think about how we find the main idea, we really have to consider repeated ideas as important. If an author takes the time to repeat, restate, or reference an idea over and over again, it's a big one. It's also important if there are many pieces of evidence/reasons/examples that connect to it. But this idea which makes sense to adults can be very abstract to little people.

Here's a strategy to use to introduce finding main ideas. You take a song - I chose Octopus's Garden. I'm not sure why. It was literally the first song that popped into my brain when I thought, "What song shall I use?" Here are the lyrics.

I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade
He'd let us in, knows where we've been
In his octopus' garden in the shade

I'd ask my friends to come and see
An octopus' garden with me
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade.

We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves
Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus' garden near a cave

We would sing and dance around
Because we know we can't be found
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade

We would shout and swim about
The coral that lies beneath the waves
(Lies beneath the ocean waves)
Oh what joy for every girl and boy
Knowing they're happy and they're safe
(Happy and they're safe)

We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden with you.

If you read through the song once, you get a general idea of what the song is about - An octopus's garden. But to create a more complete main idea, you read closely and notice what's repeated. In many songs, the chorus is repeated - it's the repeated part of the song where we get the big ideas.  In this song, this is what is repeated: "I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus' garden in the shade/with you." It is specifically about the author's feelings towards the octopus's garden.

The repeated chorus gives us an idea of the main message/idea of the song. In addition to this, the other verses support the chorus, or main idea. Why does he want to be in an octopus's garden? Several reasons.

1. No one there to tell us what to do.

2. Girls and boys know they're happy and safe.

3. We'd be warm, below the storm.

etc.

The other verses support, or provide reasons/examples for the repeated main idea in the chorus. Nice, huh?

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Nonfiction: Main Idea Madness

Main idea is so important. Not just because it's a little skill kids need to answer questions like "What is paragraph 3 mainly about?" because that's not a very good reason. It's because, in nonfiction text, if a student can't identify what's important, they aren't determining importance! They're focusing on what's interesting rather than important. Interesting is ok when reading for enjoyment, but if we're reading for information - a vast amount of our adult reading time is spent reading for information - we need to be able to glean what's important on a large scale.

But it's hard!

This is a very very simple anchor chart we've used with kids to help them think about main ideas. 

I like the "Clues can be in" section because repeated ideas are often very important. There's a reason why the writer chose to repeat that idea/word/phrase so much. IT'S KIND OF A BIG DEAL! So that can be a big clue. 

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Nonfiction: Cause-Effect Text Structure

Our school has spent about a month in an expository unit already, and a lot of the grade levels are currently working on text structures. The structures that third grade works with are sequential order and cause and effect. Fourth grade adds compare-contrast, and fifth grade adds logical order and classification scheme. 

We have worked hard on starting with a tangible experience - something hands-on designed to have the kids notice patterns in language, etc., and then bridging to application in a text. We're trying to scaffold students' understanding of the ideas.

Text structures always seems to be the key for students to really comprehend. I feel like students often read superficially, skimming and browsing through the text, but not really noticing or reading closely enough to consider the relationships between words in sentences, paragraphs, and the overall text. This happens in fiction and nonfiction, but it's especially difficult in nonfiction.

For cause and effect - a difficult standard introduced and tested in third grade, we decided to start with an anchor chart and Mix-Pair-Share activity with statements on cards. This is the anchor chart we created as a sample:

First, kids will recieve a set of cause and effect statements on cards. Each student receives a card. They mix-pair-share to find their cause-effect match. Then, in their partners, they use the sentence stems on the anchor chart to build sentences including their cards.

My favorite part is the sentence stems on the bottom. We're trying to get kids to use the stems in speaking and writing. We're hoping this will help them think about the relationship between ideas and how sentence structures contribute to that.

One common misconception I've found with text structures is where we see them. In the standards, it feels like the entire text will be a cause-effect structure, or a sequence, but in reality, it's usually a few sentences, a paragraph, or a section of text that are organized that way. Several different types of text structures can be used in one text.

To help other teachers out with these topics of nonfiction, I've been working on a Nonfiction Pack that includes these activities as well as many others! I'm super excited about it - it will be my largest reading pack to date! I'll let you know when it's up!

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