Telling a Detail from the Main Idea

Get Ready

Every detail in this book is true. Today you sort sentences by the job they do.

Today’s story

What a Beaver Does to a River

An article, in five parts. About 240 words.

Words to know

heronsTall birds with long legs that catch fish in shallow water.
drownedUnder water for so long that they died.
dozensLots and lots. A dozen is twelve.

Read and Answer

Read one page. Then answer the question in the yellow box.

Page 1 of 3

Teeth like chiselsA beaver’s front teeth never stop growing. They are orange, and the fronts are harder than the backs. As the beaver chews wood, its teeth wear into a sharp edge, like a chisel. A beaver can cut down a tree as thick as your leg in one night.

Building the damThe beaver does not eat most of the wood. It drags the branches into the stream. It pushes them together into a wall. It packs the gaps with mud and stones until the water cannot get through. This wall is called a dam.

What job does “They are orange” do?

Page 2 of 3

The pond appearsBehind the dam, the stream stops running and spreads out. In a few weeks, there is a pond where the narrow stream used to be. The beaver builds its home, called a lodge, in the middle of the pond. The door is underwater, so no fox can follow it inside.

Who else moves inThe pond is not only for beavers. Frogs lay their eggs in the still water. Herons stand in the shallow water and catch fish. Dragonflies hunt over the pond, and moss grows on the drowned trees. Before, only a few kinds of animals lived along the stream. Now dozens of kinds live there.

Page 3 of 3

And then a meadowOne day the beavers move away, and the dam breaks. The pond drains, and a flat bed of rich mud is left behind. Grass grows there first, then flowers, then young trees. The place that was a stream, and then a pond, becomes a meadow.

Read It All

Answer all the questions to open the whole story.

My Notebook

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

What You Learned

Details tell how, why or how much.
Being true does not make a sentence the main idea.
Take away a detail and the main idea still stands.

For the grown-up

Children choose the most interesting sentence as the main idea, and the most interesting sentence is almost always a detail. The reliable question is what job the sentence is doing: a detail answers how, why or how much, and the idea is what it is answering about.

Reading a page together, cover one sentence and ask whether the paragraph still makes its point. If it does, that sentence was a detail.