Introductory Activities for Teaching Main Idea

These introductory activities apply the concept of main idea to real life objects rather than a story. Once students
begin understanding the concept with these activities, you can transfer the skills to pieces of writing.

Main Idea Activities Lead to Better Writing

Activities for teaching main idea encompass a broad range of ideas. These activities provide the necessary practice
for kids to identify the basic topic of writing, leading to a better understanding of the piece. Whether they are just
beginning or need a refresher, main idea activities serve as a key component to the language arts curriculum.

Writing Paragraphs

Writing a paragraph based on a given main idea provides an alternative view to the concept. Instead of identifying
and differentiating between the main idea and supporting details, the students have the job of creating them. This
activity begins with each child selecting a main idea. He uses it to write the topic sentence of the paragraph. He then
writes supporting detail sentences that relate back to the main idea.

Categorization

Activities that focus on categorizing objects ease kids into learning about main ideas. Create a list of words that fall
under particular categories. Ideas include clothing, food, transportation or furniture. The students group the items
and assign each collection a category heading that summarizes how they are similar. Older kids can come up with
the category labels on their own, while younger kids may need a list of options.

Two Word Description

Another real world activity is to have the kids describe something using only two words. This is quite challenging
for most kids who want to share all the juicy details. The concept behind the activity is that the kids will choose two
words to summarize a particular event, representing the main idea of it. The two word description works well for a
variety of topics, including a dream they had the previous night, what happened over the weekend or a favorite party
they attended. “Scary monsters” is an example for a dream. It includes important elements that provide a basic
description, or main idea, of a dream. 1. Delivery to offshore testers, particularly if development is
onsite

2. Test Design, it helps you design how you will test the product, much like a developer who is
designing how he or she will program the software

3. Repeatible process, particularly useful if bringing in a new tester

4. Provides some additional data to help support "gut feel" which has no data

5. Legal documents of testing work, in case information is needed for law suits or other legal
entaglements

Test cases do not need to be long and tedious. You can create high level test cases that describe
functional behavior(s), outline the test data needed, and list the expected results. Using these
types of test cases, helps increase the rate of test case creation, and leaves room to perform
prescriptive and descriptive testing.