The Ultimate Guide: Teaching Main Idea to 3rd Graders – Strategies for Success and Engaged Learning

Are you a teacher looking for effective strategies to teach main idea to 3rd graders? In this post, I am going to teach you just that!  Teaching main idea is an essential skill as it helps students develop their comprehension and understanding of a text, but sometimes it can either get boring for students or hard to teach students. In this post, I will share with you some easy ideas you can implement this week to help you teach main idea to 3rd graders.

The Importance of Teaching Main Idea to 3rd Graders

Having students learn how to identify the main idea of a text will help them as they navigate through reading in the real world. Adults spend a lot of time reading a text and looking for just the main idea, so teaching them how to accurately find the main idea is essential! 

It can be a challenge to teach students main idea. Students tend to mix up main idea and details and they struggle to look past just stating the title as the main idea. Pushing students to realize that the main idea sums up the entire text and is more than just the title can be tough.

Strategies to Introduce Main Idea to 3rd Graders

I love to use recipes to introduce main idea for lots of reasons. I can show students that yes the title is important, but if you don’t have enough detail in the title then it is not a good main idea. Plus, it is a great way to show the difference between main idea and detail. 

Here are two ways you can do this…

• Main Idea and Detail Cooking– this blog post gives you everything you need to make dirt pudding with your class to introduce main idea and detail. It is great for teaching students how to read and create a recipe. At the same time, you are teaching them the difference between main idea and detail.
• Home Connection Recipes– have students go home and write one of their family recipes, but leave off the title. Then, you read the recipes to the class and they determine the title. This is a great place to show that you can’t just call something “meatball” because it doesn’t give enough detail to the entire recipe. This is where you can discuss and show the difference between main idea and detail while also creating a strong main idea.

Below are a few videos that you can use to introduce main idea as well!

Engaging Activities for Teaching Main Idea

• Read “Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla by K. A. Applegate  and then do a directed drawing of a gorilla. Have students write the main idea inside the gorillas belly and then details on their body! This is a fun way to explicitly teach main idea and details. 
• Assign students this EPIC collection and let them read any book in the collection. Then, they determine the main idea and three details. Have them switch with another group and this group reads the book to decide if they agree or disagree with the main idea and detail. In this activity, they are working on main idea twice, working cooperatively, and determining how to grade.
• Have students write informational reports (heyyy writing standards) and then have other students read and determine main idea and supporting details in the writing of their peers. When prewriting, you can have them start with the main idea so they can look at how to write with a main idea in mind. 

Want a whole week full of engaging activities? Check out this unit here!

Differentiated Instruction for Teaching Main Idea

Making sure that you are reaching each reader in your classroom can be the most difficult part of teaching main idea to 3rd graders. You want to make sure that you are providing interventions to students who are struggling with the skill, but also pushing the students that are starting to master the skill. BUT, with main idea and detail it can be super easy because you can differentiate in a few different ways.

• When choosing texts to practice with, give the enrichment students higher level texts that require them to read more complex selections to determine the main idea and details. Then, give your intervention students some texts that are read to them or are at a lower reading level.
• When trying to just teach students main idea, highlight a few details in the text they are working with. Then, they can look at those details and attempt to determine what the main idea is. 
• Give your higher level students a main idea and have them write a short paragraph with several details. Then, have them read their paragraph to a lower level student who has to determine their main idea. This is a great activity because while the higher level students are writing their paragraphs you can work with the lower level students to continue to practice main idea.

Assessing and Reinforcing Main Idea Skills

After teaching main idea explicitly with the activities above you are going to want to assess your students. Write down which students did not master the concept so that you can continue to work with them throughout the year.

 But teaching main idea should be something that is happening daily. When you do a read aloud, explicitly show students how to find the main idea in the text that you are reading through a “think-aloud”. Whenever you are reading any nonfiction text have students determine the main idea, even if that is not what you are focusing on.

Resources and Tools for Teaching Main Idea

• This unit will give you everything you need to teach main idea and detail in an engaging and differentiated way.
• Check out these books below which are great to read aloud and think aloud main idea.
  

• Play a few of these online games for students to work on practicing main idea and details.
  • Using Key Details Game
  • Determine the Main Idea Game
  • Main Idea & Detail Game