Third-Grade Teaching Ideas on a Main Idea
Teaching third-grade students how to identify the main idea of a paragraph or a passage is a challenging task, as it demands reading comprehension abilities beyond understanding what happened or who did what. The main idea is the short, concise expression of what the author wanted to communicate in a paragraph, chapter or the full story. However, reading a story to third-graders and asking them to miraculously identify the main idea can't lead to any results. Instead, you must introduce simple tasks that can help students understand the concept of the main idea and how to easily spot it in a text.
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Choose the Main Idea
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Give students simple paragraphs, containing no more than five sentences. One sentence must be a general remark, with the rest providing supporting details. For example, a paragraph can be: "A car has many uses. We can use it to go to work, go to vacation and take kids to school. It also has space to store our luggage." Ask students to choose which sentence gives us the main idea of the paragraph. Keep changing the position of the topic sentence, so that kids don't link the opening sentence with the main idea.
Who, What, Why
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When a passage is about narrating events and not describing facts, the main idea is the brief description of what happened. As such, the passage's paragraphs do not contain topic sentences with supporting details. For this purpose, ask children the three basic questions who (did something), what (happened) and why (it happened). For example, the main idea of a multi-paragraph adventure story can be as concise as: "Three archaeologists explored the pyramid of Khafre to find ancient treasures."
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Main Idea Graph
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Ask children to design a long horizontal rectangle at the top of their notebook page and three to five narrower rectangles further down the page. The large rectangle is the space where students must write down the main idea of a passage or a story, while the smaller rectangles are reserved for the supporting details. Allow children to read a short paragraph and note down the main idea and the details.
What We Learned From a Story
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The main idea is not a single word or an arbitrary sentence, but not a detailed description of a passage's contents either. It is what the author wanted to communicate to the reader, and in a well-written text, this means what we can easily remember from it. For example, read a paragraph on water's forms. The paragraph will mention water's solid, liquid and gaseous states. Afterwards, ask children what they have learned from the paragraph, prompting them to avoid details and give a general answer. The only possible answer is that water can take many forms, which is the main idea of the paragraph.
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