An interactive quiz with seven multiple choice questions over four short reading passages. Questions focus on identifying the main ideas and supporting details and choosing an appropriate summary. When finished, students can submit...

A lesson designed to teach learners how to recognize an effective summary. Following the lesson, several practice fiction and nonfiction texts are available in both English and Spanish for grades 3, 4, and 5. Answer key provided. [PDF]

The interactive lesson is a review of main idea and supporting details.

A brief graphic organizer to help students visualize the similarities and differences in a piece of informational text.

A thirty-part learning module on text structures including description, sequence, problem and solution, compare and contrast, and cause and effect. Lessons include links to pictures, story text, informational text, videos, charts,...

A twelve-part learning module with links to images, texts, slides, and charts that teach skills to build reading comprehension with informational texts.

Slideshow provides an explanation of the author's purpose which is to reflect, inform, persuade, or entertain (RIPE).

A teacher created lesson plan to help students conquer how to make connections between directions in an effort to create something. This activity will have students sharing recipes and understanding why recipes should be followed in...

[Free Registration/Login Required] This lesson focuses on the determining the main idea and details.

Read through a lesson about main ideas and supporting details to understand their importance. Practice choosing the main idea of three nonfiction paragraphs. Features practice activities to enhance learning.

This is a PDF printable worksheet for grades 1-3 to teach students how to use a glossary to answer questions.

This one-page printable worksheet is designed for classroom use in evaluating a reading of nonfiction. The evaluation is set up in a rubric format.

Use this graphic organizer to compare or contrast ideas, things, or texts. This is a great cross-curricular tool to use for both reading strategies and prewriting.

Students read forty short texts and choose the main idea of each text. Correct answers are provided for any missed, and the score is tallied along the way.

A brief lesson plan, this site offers an example of non-fiction text and a graphic organizer to help orient students to the features they need to use when reading for information.

A five-part learning module with links to videos and images about finding the main idea of a text.