When teaching main idea, start by letting students know where to look. To find the basic main idea, students can look at titles, subtitles, and the first sentence or paragraph. These areas will give the reader a basic idea of what the main idea is. Also let students know that the main idea is the topic that is the main or most important focus of the text.

When summarizing, students may use the "5 W" method. (Who, When, Where, What, Why) Students should also use transition words to help them when summarizing. It is important to pick out the key details from a text when writing a summary. However, it is also important to be concise! Summarization requires a delicate balance between including key details and not including too many details.

Teachers can use graphic organizers to help teach summarization. It is important to have students work with both fiction and nonfiction texts when summarizing. Start by working with fiction texts, and work your way up to nonfiction articles.

• First, students need to learn that punctuation is required at the end of a sentence. A period, exclamation point, or question mark is required. Students need to be able to determine which of these punctuation marks is correct in each situation. For example, if the word "what" is at the beginning of the sentence, that probably means there will be a question mark at the end of the sentence.
• Commas are required in a number of situations. Teachers need to break down commas into many separate lessons. Some of the lessons they should include are: comma after an introductory phrase, making lists, comma before a conjunction, and a comma to set off a quotation.
• Remember to stress that students should be using capital letters at the beginning of a sentence, and for all proper nouns. Spend a few lessons on the different types of proper nouns. Be sure to remind students that the capital letter should be twice as tall as the lowercase letter.