The Main Idea: Transportation

As a part of our lessons on how to identify the main idea of texts, we read several books from We Give Books and Reading A-Z about various forms of transportation. Each day we read a new expository text and the students had to verbally identify the main idea of the text. We used Multi-Flow Maps to help chart the details that lead up to the main idea. (Sorry... I did not take a picture of these charts.) After reading about the various types of transporation, the students created a Circle Map of as many examples as they could think of. We then discussed how those examples could be divided into conceptual categories. So, we then created a spider web graphic organizer to sort the examples into the categories of land, air, and water. The students then created a three part foldable to illusrtate one example of transportation from each category. They then wrote at least one fact they learned about that mode of transportation under the flap.

Conceptual Sorting

Last week we worked on sorting words into conceptual groups. One of the sorts we did was to identify living and non-living things. This was an extension of a lesson we did at the Nature Center pond. We made a t-chart with two smaller t-charts on it. The students first read the card, decided if it was living or non-living, and then decided if it was singular or plural. After sorting all of the cards, the students identified how to make the word singular or plural, whatever was needed, and we added it to the chart. We then discussed how to make a word a plural.