Main Idea in a Longer Text

Get Ready

Each part has a main idea. The whole book has one too. Today you build it.

Today’s story

What a Beaver Does to a River

An article, in five parts. About 240 words.

Words to know

chiselA tool with a sharp, flat edge for cutting wood.
dozensLots and lots. A dozen is twelve.
meadowA wide, open field of grass and flowers.

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 does a heading usually tell you?

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

Every part has a main idea. The whole book has one too.
For the whole book, each part’s idea becomes a detail.
Headings often tell you a part’s main idea.

For the grown-up

A whole text has a main idea above its paragraphs, and the paragraph ideas become its supporting details. That change of level is the step into real comprehension of longer writing, and the tests are the same ones from lesson one.

With a non-fiction book, read only the headings of a chapter and ask what the chapter as a whole is claiming.