Reading Skills Lesson Plan: Key Ideas and Details

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This lesson accompanies the BrainPOP topic Reading Skills, and supports the standard of determining the main idea of the text and summarizing key details. Students demonstrate understanding through a variety of projects.

Step 1: ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Ask students:

• What strategies do you already use when reading a text for the first time?

Step 2: BUILD KNOWLEDGE

• Read aloud the description on the Reading Skills topic page.
• Play the Movie, pausing to check for understanding. 
• Have students read one of the Related Reading articles. Partner them with someone who read a different article to share what they learned with each other.
  

Step 3: APPLY and ASSESS 

Students take the Reading Skills Quiz, applying essential literacy skills while demonstrating what they learned about this topic.

Step 4: DEEPEN and EXTEND

Students express what they learned about reading skills while practicing essential literacy skills with one or more of the following activities. Differentiate by assigning ones that meet individual student needs.

• Make-a-Movie: Choose a short story, an article, or something else you read recently. Make a movie to answer this question: How can using the visualization strategy help to understand a text’s central ideas?
• Make-a-Map: Make a concept map identifying different reading skills and provide examples of how to use them to better understand a text.
• Creative Coding: Code learning game challenging players to sort reading skills and related vocabulary into self-selected categories. 

More to Explore

Related BrainPOP Topics: Deepen understanding of reading to understand central ideas with these topics: Main Idea, Context Clues, and Media Literacy. 

Teacher Support Resources:

• Pause Point Overview: Video tutorial showing how Pause Points actively engage students  to stop, think, and express ideas. 
• Learning Activities Modifications: Strategies to meet ELL and other instructional and student needs.
• Learning Activities Support: Resources for best practices using BrainPOP.