Friendship ~ The Main Idea

At the beginning of the year, we certainly focus on making new friends and maintaining positive friendships.  Friendship and kindness will be a year long theme, something we need to constantly develop and enhance.  We, of course, also have third grade reading content standards to master.  I just love how beautifully the friendship theme and the important third grade standard of understanding main idea and detail come together in Nancy Carlson's delightful picture book How to Lose All Your Friends.

After a couple reads of the text, students got into teams.  They worked together to find the main key star ideas and the supporting details.  Using a color code (yellow for key star idea and red for supporting detail) the students matched details to main idea and sequenced the story.

The main character's behavior in the book was quite appalling.  We discussed many ways the girl could have behaved differently to keep friends instead of losing them.  The ideas the student came up with all aligned with our Eagle Elite 18.  

The students are becoming very good at identifying the main idea.  In our school rules and procedures, the students saw three important key star ideas came up.  Be kind, be safe, and be responsible.  Another activity we did was taking different school rules and procedures (details) and sorted them into the main idea categories of be kind, be safe, and be responsible.