Reading Comprehension: Finding the Main Idea, Details, and Summarizing

Hi there!

How’s it going? If you are new to Ascend SMARTER Intervention, welcome! Every week we post tips and tricks to help get your struggling reader/readers to grade level. Today, we want to talk about reading comprehension.

Reading Comprehension - Why is it so hard?!

Over the years, I have heard so many different reasons why reading comprehension is tricky for students. We know that if a student is struggling to decode the words they’re reading it will impact comprehension. If they are decoding accurately but their rate is slow it can impact comprehension. If the connection between their orthographic and semantic skills is struggling comprehension will suffer.

Basically - comprehension can be tricky!

The good news - teaching comprehension doesn’t have to be! We are all about simplicity and effectiveness and want to show you how we embody that in our comprehension instruction.

So, how do we most effectively support comprehension?

There are a few things we can do to support comprehension.

First, we need to support decoding.

The child needs to be able to decode a word in order to read it and eventually tie meaning to it. This by itself though, is not enough. Just because a student’s decoding becomes more accurate and their fluency (reading speed & accuracy combined) improves does not mean that the child will magically understand everything they are reading.

We also need to be explicitly teaching them how to understand a text.

This starts with helping them build connections. If you haven’t had an opportunity to read our “How to Teach Vocabulary Explicitly” blog from last week, >>click here<< to check it out. In it, we explain how early vocabulary development will support a student’s ability to comprehend more advanced text.

When a student reads a full passage, they are taking in all kinds of details. By taking these and categorizing them into buckets - they can more easily find the main idea. Without the ability to see how everything comes together, students will struggle to take away the main point of the paragraph or passage as a whole.

How do we teach students to recognize how these details come together?

When you have a student reading a passage, I suggest having them use two different highlighters and a pen/pencil to mark up the text.

Start with one paragraph at a time. Have the student read the paragraph and ask them what the key takeaway is from that paragraph. What was the main idea/what did the author want us to learn? If the student is able to properly categorize all of the details they just read, they should be able to produce the main idea. Have them take this key point and write it in the margin next to the paragraph.

Then, go back into the text with your first highlighter. Where in the text do they introduce that main idea? Have students find it and highlight it. Sometimes, this will be the first sentence. We are taught, as writers, that we need to introduce our topic in the first sentence of our paragraphs. Let me be clear though - this strategy is not always accurate because the authors whose works we are reading don’t always do this. That may be a good place to start, but we really need to be thinking about how all of the details come together and look for that key takeaway (or most important) message.

Your other highlighter will be used to find the details. These should answer our “question words” like who, what, when, where, and why. Each of these should fit under the umbrella of our main idea. If they don’t, this may tell us that we need to reevaluate what we picked as the main idea.

At first, students may need a LOT of modeling. That’s okay! Work through this with students until they can independently find the main idea and details.

Next steps: Writing Summaries

The reason we have students annotate the main points in the margins is so they can

A) practice finding the main idea,

B) more easily find the topics they are looking for in the text later (this is especially helpful as they get older and read long textbooks or stories), and

C) these annotations will become the sentences of their summary.

A critical comprehension skill that students often struggle with is summarizing the text. Often, they will either provide a detail that is way too specific (leaving other key pieces out) or, they will retell every detail they can remember from the story. Once they have their annotations, they can turn each into a sentence and that will become the body of the summary. By pulling the main ideas from each paragraph, they should be able to pull the main “who, what, when, where, and why” ideas from the text as a whole. If they can’t answer each of those questions after writing their summary, they may need to go back into the passage and find them but by annotating first, they save a ton of time and are less likely to leave out key pieces.

We hope this helps when it comes to your comprehension instruction! I know it has been a game-changer for my students.

For resources to target comprehension and the other core components of literacy, check out the 5CCL Activity Library. You can learn more about the hundreds of activities available there by clicking the button below!