Main Idea in a Longer Text

Step 1: Before You Read

Watch the idea first — 67 seconds. Then read on, and try it yourself in the next step.

Each part of this article has a main idea. The whole article has one too, sitting above them. Today you read all five parts and build it.

Today’s story

What a Beaver Does to a River

An article, in five parts. About 230 words.

Step 2: Read the Story

One part at a time. Press Listen, or read it yourself. The tutor reads along with you.

The tutor shows

Teeth like chiselsA beaver’s front teeth never stop growing. They are orange, and they are harder on the front than on the back, so they wear into a chisel shape as the beaver gnaws. A beaver can bring down a willow as thick as your leg in a single night.

Building the damThe beaver does not eat most of the wood. It drags the branches into the stream and pushes them into a wall, packing the gaps with mud and stones until the water can no longer get through. This wall is called a dam.

What does a heading usually give you?

The pond appearsBehind the dam, the stream stops running and spreads out. Within a few weeks there is a pond where there was once a narrow channel. The beaver builds its lodge in the middle of it, with the entrance underwater, where no fox can follow.

Who else moves inThe pond is not only for beavers. Frogs lay their eggs in the still water. Herons stand in the shallows and fish. Dragonflies hunt over the surface, and moss grows on the drowned trunks. A stretch of stream that held a handful of species now holds dozens.

And then a meadowOne day the beavers move on, and the dam breaks. The pond drains, and what is left is a flat bed of rich mud where the water stood. Grass takes it first, then flowers, then young trees. The place that was a stream, and then a pond, becomes a meadow.

Step 3: The Whole Story

Finish reading with the tutor, and the whole story appears here with its parts named.

Step 4: My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write down two things you noticed.

Step 5: What You Learned

Every paragraph has a main idea. The whole text has one above them.
At the level of a whole text, the paragraph ideas become the details.
Headings often state a paragraph’s main idea for you.

For the grown-up

A whole text has a main idea above its paragraphs, and the paragraph ideas become its supporting details. That change of level is the step into real comprehension of longer writing, and the tests are the same ones from lesson one.

With a non-fiction book, read only the headings of a chapter and ask what the chapter as a whole is claiming.