Let's unpack essential skills for IEP goals and teaching strategies that can help your students identify the main or central ideas in text. We'll explore five specific goals and strategies that you can start implementing in your classroom to bolster your students' reading comprehension.
Key Takeaways:
The main idea is critical to comprehending any text and understanding the author's purpose.
Supporting details are crucial facts, statistics, examples, or other information that support the main idea.
Implementing these strategies can help your students become proficient at finding key ideas.
Key Main Idea IEP Goals
Standards Base: Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary of the text.
Student Goal Success: By (date), when given grade-level informational text on (topic), the student will:
Find (3) supporting details and conclude the main or central idea from these details, improving reading comprehension from 0/10 work samples out of ten consecutive trials to 8/10.
Actionable Steps:
Provide a structured worksheet with three columns for students to identify key details.
Create a list of guiding questions that help students infer the main idea from supporting details.
Select the main idea from a multiple-choice answer bank, improving reading comprehension from 0/10 work samples out of ten consecutive trials to 8/10.
Actionable Steps:
Develop a practice activity using short passages with multiple-choice questions focusing on the main idea.
Provide templates where students can highlight supporting details directly in the text.
Identify the main idea by finding supporting details, improving reading comprehension from 0/10 work samples out of ten consecutive trials to 8/10.
Actionable Steps:
Design worksheets that emphasize identifying supporting details and summarizing the main idea.
Share graphic organizers that break down the structure of different text types.
Find and combine the main ideas of two grade-level texts, improving comprehension from 0/10 work samples out of ten consecutive trials to 8/10.
Actionable Steps:
Provide templates for students to compare and contrast two texts on the same topic.
Create a step-by-step guide for combining ideas into a coherent summary.
Highlight common details in a text and infer the main idea, improving comprehension from 0/10 work samples out of ten consecutive trials to 8/10.
Actionable Steps:
Share inference worksheets that guide students through identifying common details.
Develop templates that allow students to hypothesize and confirm the main idea.
Practical Strategies to Master Key Ideas
1. Identifying Keywords and Phrases:Have students highlight keywords and phrases that relate directly to the main idea. For example, in a text on "The benefits of exercise," look for health, fitness, weight loss, muscle strength, and similar terms.
2. Making Inferences:Teach students to make educated guesses by inferring based on text information. For instance, in a story about a lion cub and its mother, students might infer the main idea as "the bond between a mother and her child."
3. Practice with Various Texts:Provide opportunities for students to identify the main idea in diverse texts. Offer worksheets or activities that encourage this skill.
Common Challenges and Solutions:
Understanding Keywords and Supporting Details:
Challenge: Students struggle to differentiate between primary and secondary details.
Solution: Teach students to focus on repeating keywords, topic sentences, and summary statements.
Inferencing Skills:
Challenge: Students may find it difficult to infer the main idea from supporting details.
Solution: Provide practice with shorter passages, and guide them through asking questions like, "What does the author mean here?"
Distractions and Skimming:
Challenge: Skimming can cause students to miss essential details.
Solution: Teach active reading strategies, like annotating margins and asking guiding questions while reading.
Have your own strategies or experiences to share? Leave a comment below, or feel free to reach out with questions!
