When No Sentence States It

Get Ready

Sometimes a sentence says the main idea. Sometimes none does, and you build it yourself.

Today’s story

What a Beaver Does to a River

An article, in five parts. About 240 words.

Words to know

lodgeA beaver’s home, built of sticks and mud.
shallowNot deep.
drainsLoses its water, as the water runs out.

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.

Which part says its main idea in a sentence?

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

Some parts say their main idea. Many do not.
When none does, find what the details share.
Say it in one sentence, then test it.

For the grown-up

Unstated main ideas are the common case in real books, and the step children miss is that the answer has to be written by them rather than found. The method is the same afterwards: build a sentence, then test it against every sentence in the paragraph.

When a paragraph has no topic sentence, ask what all its sentences have in common, and make your child say it as one whole sentence.