Identifying key ideas

Identifying key ideas

Evaluating details will help you better understand the key ideas, which will allow you to fully and accurately understand overall themes, controlling ideas, and purposes of different texts. 

Evaluate details to determine key ideas, using the following questions as a guide: 

• What details are included? 

• Does this detail relate to or provide support for a key idea? 

• What is the key idea that this detail suggests? 

Instructions

Read the following paragraphs from "The Teacher Who Changed My Life below." Then, drag and drop details from the text into the chart to show which key idea they support.

The Teacher Who Changed My Life

7 I was soon under Miss Hurd’s spell. She did indeed teach us to put out a newspaper, skills I honed during my next 25 years as a journalist. Soon I asked the principal to transfer me to her English class as well. There, she drilled us on grammar until I finally began to understand the logic and structure of the English language. She assigned stories for us to read and discuss; not tales of heroes, like the Greek myths I knew, but stories of underdogs—poor people, even immigrants, who seemed ordinary until a crisis drove them to do something extraordinary. She also introduced us to the literary wealth of Greece—giving me a new perspective on my war-ravaged, impoverished homeland. I began to be proud of my origins..

The Teacher Who Changed My Life

8 One day, after discussing how writers should write about what they know, she assigned us to compose an essay from our own experience. Fixing me with a stern look, she added, “Nick, I want you to write about what happened to your family in Greece.” I had been trying to put those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment. Then, on a warm spring afternoon, I sat in my room with a yellow pad and pencil and stared out the window at the buds on the trees. I wrote that the coming of spring always reminded me of the last time I said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold day in 1948.

Multiple Select

Key Idea: Miss Hurd was a great teacher.

• I had been trying to put those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment.

• I wrote that the coming of spring always reminded me of the last time I said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold day in 1948.

• There, she drilled us on grammar until I finally began to understand the logic and structure of the English language.

• I was soon under Miss Hurd’s spell.

• Soon I asked the principal to transfer me to her English class as well.

Multiple Select

Key Idea: The author had a difficult childhood.

• She also introduced us to the literary wealth of Greece—giving me a new perspective on my war-ravaged, impoverished homeland.

• I had been trying to put those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment.

• I was soon under Miss Hurd’s spell.

• I wrote that the coming of spring always reminded me of the last time I said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold day in 1948.

• Soon I asked the principal to transfer me to her English class as well.