Comprehending Informational Text – Part Two

Another strategy is called Notice What Repeats. This strategy helps students identify the main topic of a book. Beginning level books often don’t have a main “idea” but rather a “main topic” – it’s the difference between saying the book is about “baseball” (topic) and the book is about how “baseball is an important part of American culture” (topic + idea).  For younger readers asking them to determine a main idea may be too challenging of a task considering the complexity of the text.  As a note, as you are selecting texts, you will need to consider this when planning for strategies that support the standard and text you are utilizing with students.

Prompting can be used to support students with this strategy. Some prompts you may want to use are:

·        What repeats on each page in the concepts or ideas?

·        What repeats on each page in the pictures?

·        What is the book mostly about?

·        State the main topic.

·        Look for what’s the same.

·        Put a finger on any words that are the same on these couple of pages.

·        You found a repeating word!  Now, what’s the topic?

Remember, it will take lots of modeling and practice before students will internalize these strategies.  Anchor charts are helpful tools for students to use to remind them how and when to use a strategy.