We've been working on identifying main ideas in text. That is the major reading comprehension strategy we are focused on. Today we had additional instruction on how to find it, and then how to find supporting details. What I was realizing in my instruction is that the reader needs to continually ask themselves what the author is trying to communicate.
The context for this was reading about the Age of Exploration. While it isn't a Social Studies EALR, it provides background for those first few colonies (I one or two who thought North America hadn't been invented yet). As we were reading about the astrolabe, an instrument similar to a compass, we muddled through finding main ideas. "The main idea is that it has a metal arm..." Where I was intentional in my instruction was trying to connect the heading and chapter title to the passage. After that I gave direction about where to usually look. "Authors want to tell us something, and they want their reader to know the main thing really quickly... the first 2 or 3 sentences usually."
Finding the main idea is difficult. My goal is to make them more critical readers. We want to read everything, but we also want to be strategic in what we are looking for.
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