A Main Idea Week in 4th Grade

Hi, everyone! I wanted to stop in and share some ideas about teaching Main Idea! I don't know about you, but this is a skill my students seem to always have difficulty with. 

First of all, the students glued this foldable into their Interactive Reading Notebooks. Each time I asked them to find the main idea of a passage they looked back in their notebooks and followed the steps we'd practiced. That first day's practice was some simple paragraphs I put up on the Smartboard. 

The next day started out with a review using our notebooks and then I had the students glue some practice paragraphs onto the other side of their notebooks.

These little passages all came from this 3rd grade lesson on Readworks.org. It was great practice for us and I love that everyone now has this glued in their notebook and can go back to see how we applied the process from our foldable.

On the third day of our study the kiddos reviewed the steps and then got into pairs to work on finding the main idea of the passage below. 

They used this free graphic organizer from Wendy Gilstrap on Teachers Pay Teachers. 

I like to have my students work on coming up with the main idea using their own words rather than choosing a specific sentence from the paragraph or passage to be the main idea. That's not to say that we don't use sentences from the passage as main ideas, but I don't really give them the option of just looking for one sentence to choose. I want them to think it through in their heads and then see if they can match a sentence or phrase from the paragraph to their thinking. It seems to me that so many standardized test questions now are asking students to formulate a main idea on their own rather than just pick one from the story/passage.

After all the groups were finished we went over the passage together as a class to discuss our ideas and come up with what we thought were the best supporting details for the main idea the students chose. 

I had the class do this routine a couple times until I felt like everyone was ready to try the skill on their own. I gave all my kiddos one of the main idea sheets from the Reading Passages section on Readworks to try the skill on their own. Then, we discussed the questions and answers in class. Finally, I used another of the main idea passages as an assessment. 

Quick Tip 

I always teach my kids to use tally marks when they are answering main idea multiple choice questions. For each answer choice go back to the paragraph and count up all the evidence that supports that idea. Each piece of evidence gets a tally mark and the answer with the most tally marks wins! It is an almost fail proof system to answering those questions if students will take the time to use it! 

Do you have a favorite main idea lesson you'd like to share? I'm always looking for something new to add to my bag of tricks! 

Pronoun Freebie and a Giveaway

Happy Monday, friends! I am keeping my fingers crossed for some time at school with my kiddos this week! I've had plenty of time off, so that means a new freebie for you! 

I needed a quick lesson to review pronouns with my kiddos and get some notes into their Interactive Notebooks, so I came up with this little freebie. You can click on the picture above or here to pick yours up. 

I'm helping Amy from Eclectic Educating celebrate 300 blog followers!!! Click the button below to go over to her page and enter. If you've not checked out her blog you don't know what you're missing!! Every post from Amy is full of great resources and activities I can use in my classroom!! 

Media Messages Lesson Ideas

Do you teach your students about media messages? Last year our SOLs (standards) changed and we had to include media messages into our Language Arts curriculum. The state wants our students to be able to categorize a message as auditory, visual, or written. In addition, students need to analyze the source, authorship, purpose, and intended audience of the message. 

As with anything new, resources are sometimes short so I thought I'd share a few resources I've found and one I created.

First up. I found this amazing site last year called Admongo and it is fabulous! Like the name suggests, this one focuses more on advertisements and I felt that is where my students needed the most teaching. After all, think about how many ways our students are exposed to advertising in a day and some of them are so subtle it is difficult them to even understand they are being the target of an advertisement. 

Both the teacher and student sides of this site are great! The student side is a very fun, interactive game where they look at and analyze different types of media. The teacher site has a lot of great lesson ideas. 

We read bits and pieces of this book, but it is definitely for the older crowd. There were a few things that were over my kids' heads, but still a resource worth mentioning! 

We also looked at a lot of advertisements I pulled from the internet and some funny commercials from youtube. It was a really fun couple of days! 

I always like to include some movement in my lessons, so we created some hand motions for the 3 different types of messages: 

Visual - use your hands to make "glasses" over your eyes

Auditory - cup your hand behind your year

Written - fold your hands out like a book and "read" 

I also created a foldable for our interactive notebooks and a quiz for my students. You can click here to see it in my TPT store. 

I left the front of the foldable blank so the kiddos could add their own drawings in and they came up with some really creative stuff! 

And here we are working on the quiz. Even though I labeled it a quiz, I let them reference their notebooks because this is such a new concept. 

Do you teach media messages? What are some of your favorite resources? 

Celebrating 400 Followers with a Freebie for Everyone!!

This past week I reached a blogging milestone - 400 followers! I feel so blessed to have so many wonderful teachers actually want to read my blog! I had to celebrate in some way, so I decided a freebie was in order. 

This is my newest product and it will be free until 8:00 Monday morning! 

Don't worry, even if you don't use Interactive Notebooks you can still use this activity as a sort! 

We did this in class yesterday as a little review. Here are a few pics so you can get an idea of what it's all about! 

There are winter words on the cards that students sort into three categories: noun, verb, or adjective. 

After we checked over everything together, the kiddos used the words to create sentences. 

Then they created a color code and labeled the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in their sentences! It was a pretty fun activity and made for a great little assessment. 

You can click the product picture at the beginning of the post or click here to go to my TPT and pick up your freebie. Be sure to leave me some feedback love if you like the product! 

Thanks again for following my blog!