Main Ideas and Their Support

What text features can give you a clue of what the main idea is?

• Title
• Headings
• Pictures
• All of these

What is the best question to ask yourself when you are trying to find the main idea?

• Who is the main character?
• What is the main event?
• What is one important detail?
• What point is the author trying to make?

Emma desperately wanted the silky baby blue scarf that stared back at her from the shop window. When Mrs. Marple called to ask her to babysit, Emma knew this was her chance to earn the money to buy the scarf. After babysitting, Emma counted out her cash. She had enough to buy the scarf! The next afternoon, she raced to the store and bought the scarf, the perfect gift for her Mom! 
What's the main idea of this passage?

• Emma is an excellent babysitter.
• Emma babysits regularly for Mrs. Marple.
• Babysitting helped Emma buy her Mom the perfect scarf.
• Emma was shopping for a gift for her Mom.

Texting is the preferred method of communication for most teens 12-17. In fact, the number of texts sent daily increases with age. Twelve year olds typically send 20 text messages per day, most often just to "say hi'". That number increases to 50 messages per day, on average, for teens 14-17 years old. Girls in the 14-17 age group average over 3,000 texts per week. Given these facts, it's no wonder unlimited texting is a a must-have with a teen in the house.
What is the topic of this paragraph?

• Communicating with teens.
• The texting habits of girls.
• Teen cell phone use.
• Teens and texting.

First, there has to be wet, packable snow. If you have six or more inches on the ground, you're in great shape to start rolling. With gloves on to keep fingers warm, make a solid ball with the snow. Begin rolling across the yard, collecting snow and patting it into a larger ball as you go. Once you've rolled and packed a ball as large as a boulder, that's your snowman's base. You'll do this two more times to make the middle and head. Pretty soon, your snowman is ready to be dressed in its Snow Day best.
Pick the best title for this passage.

• Let It Snow!
• Build a Snow Day Snowman!
• Gloves & Hot Cocoa Required!
• Snowball Fight!

In 2012, Instagram made its 26-year-old creators, Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, instant multimillionaires when they sold their app company to Facebook developer, Mark Zuckerberg, for $1 billion. In fact, all 13 employees became millionaires. How popular is the millionaire-making app? If you printed off the 21.9 billion photos uploaded to Instagram in a year, it would span 4,693 miles - farther than Orlando is from the North Pole!
Which supporting detail would best fit into this paragraph?

• All 13 joined the company in its first year.
• Facebook is most popular among moms.
• Stanford University, like Harvard College, is an Ivy League school.
• Santa and the elves reside at the North Pole.

Which sentence is a supporting detail for the main idea that keeping animals in a zoo is cruel?

• Zoos play an important conservation role.
• Many zoo animals are "rescue" animals.
• Animals should be in their natural environment.
• Great improvements have been made to animal enclosures in zoos.

Which sentence is a supporting detail that recycling is important?

• There are many landfills available for waste.
• Recycling paper saves trees from being cut down.
• Clean jars before recycling them.
• Separate your paper, cans, and glass jars before recycling.

Which sentence is a supporting detail that you should get enough sleep?

• Many people sleep later on the weekends.
• Caffeine keeps some people awake at night.
• Dark rooms are best for sleeping.
• Seven to nine hours keeps you refreshed the next day.

Select the Supporting Detail to this sentence: I think the ninja mice poisoned the cheese

• Ninja mice are a rare breed of mouse.
• I saw them sneaking into the kitchen last night, whispering something to each other.
• I caught sixteen mice yesterday in the trap; they had to have been ninja mice.
• Cheese is great!