Main Idea and Details and Tips to Teach It

August 31, 2020 by Evan-Moor | 0 comments

Identifying the main idea of a text is the first step in learning to summarize important information. In addition to being one of the most important reading comprehension skills, it is also one of the most difficult to teach and for students to understand. Mastering main idea and details will serve as a foundation as students are assigned more advanced reading and must draw out the main idea. This then builds to complex analysis, making it crucial that students start practicing this skill at a young age.

Below are some tips and resources that will help you teach the main idea and details of a text and improve students’ reading comprehension. These strategies for helping students identify main idea and details are from Evan-Moor’s Reading Comprehension Fundamentals for grades 1–6.

What Is a Main Idea and Why Is It Important?

The main idea of a paragraph, story, or book is the overall “big idea” that the reader should walk away with. This could be a lesson, a moral, or just a concept. The main idea you get from a short story is going to be very different from the main idea you get from a passage in your history textbook. It’s important that students grasp the main idea, because without it, they cannot fully understand what they have just read. It is also the piece that completes the puzzle of all the other details in the story, tying them all together. Understanding how to identify the main idea is the first step is helping children learn to summarize what they read.

Tips for Finding the Main Idea

Summarization: Break the reading into chunks, whether it’s by sentence, paragraph, section, etc., and have your students summarize each chunk of text. This will help make the reading more manageable, and will help narrow down important details that support the main idea.
Highlight and Make Notes: If your students have access to the material in a hard copy format that they can write on, encourage them to highlight important details and cross out unimportant ones as they go. Post-It notes are great for note-taking in a school library book. Keep a pad nearby so children can make a note on a page without marking up the text. This is a great exercise for narrowing down the possibilities for the main idea.
Process of Elimination: If your students are having trouble finding the main idea, have them come up with 3 or 4 ideas of what it may be, then one by one see if each one connects to all other pieces of the story. Is it supported by other details? Does it connect all pieces together? If it doesn’t, it’s not the main idea. Keep doing this until one fits.
Look for Important Repetitive Phrases: Using the highlighting method, circle (or write down) repetitive key phrases. For instance, if one phrase, word, or idea is repeated a lot, it is probably very important, and will help determine what the main idea is.
Use Headings and Subheadings as Clues: Using passages with titles or subheadings is a good place to start, as it provides an inherent clue. The main idea of a passage is directly related to the title of the passage or the heading it lies under. This will help narrow down important details to find the main idea.
Find Supporting Details: The main idea will be supported by many other details in the story, and these details will “prove” why your choice is the main idea. Practice finding these as well as the main idea, as they will become increasingly important in reading comprehension and writing. Finding supporting details will also make finding the main idea easier.

Download a free main idea and supporting details worksheet from Reading Comprehension Fundamentals here.

If you’re reading with your children at home, you can help them learn to identify main idea and details by asking these questions:

What is the topic sentence? Most of the time (but not always), the main idea is stated in the topic sentence of a paragraph or essay. Ask your child to re-read the first sentence or paragraph of their reading text to see if the author points out what topic he or she will be discussing.
What is the lesson? It is easier to identify the main idea in a nonfiction article than in a piece of fiction. If you are reading fiction, ask your child what the moral or lesson in the story is.
Can you connect writing to reading? Remind your children about the format they use when they write a paragraph. They can make a connection between where they insert their topic sentence and supporting details and where main ideas are located in a text.

Practice Clue Games

To get your students thinking about clues as supporting details, make a mystery bag.
Inside this bag will be several items that all relate to one main idea.
For example: flour, eggs, frosting, cake mix.
Pull each of these items out one by one and have your students try to determine what the main idea is.
These items are all connected by the idea of “making a cake.”
This is the main idea; the things in the bag are the supporting details.

Reading Comprehension Fundamentals Grades 1–6

Reading Comprehension Fundamentals covers all the foundational elements in reading fiction and nonfiction writing. It teaches skills and strategies such as: fiction and nonfiction texts, genre studies, author’s purpose, inferences, main idea and details, compare and contrast, and more! These units practice different strategies to find common themes in passages that range in length and difficulty.

Download free sample lessons for Reading Comprehension Fundamentals here.

Improving reading comprehension will help your students excel in all subject areas, and being able to identify main ideas based on supporting details will become a crucial skill throughout their educational career. As your students advance to more difficult readings, having the foundational skills to help them fully understand what they’re reading will help them succeed.

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Christine Wooler has experience working with children as a youth soccer coach and summer camp counselor. She is currently studying English Literature and journalism in college. She enjoys exploring educational topics that help students have fun while learning.