When teaching the main idea, incorporate these helpful main idea sentence starters.
These sentence starters can be used to communicate orally or in written form.
What is also great about these sentence starters for main idea and details is that they don’t limit students’ thoughts since there are a variety of starter ideas from which to choose.
These prompts provide a helpful framework from which students can express the most important points of a book or movie.
After reading this post, you might just want to add these main idea sentence starters to your repertoire of main idea activities.
Main Idea Sentence Starters
Support reading comprehension using these main idea sentence starters.
1. To sum up…
2. Most people agree that…
3. After reading, I conclude that the main idea is…
4. Here is the main idea in 15 words or less…
5. Something I’d like to know more about is…
6. The main idea of the entire book is…
7. Most people are unfamiliar with…
8. I will never forget the time when…
9. You may be surprised to learn that…
10. Two questions I have after reading…because…
11. Here’s what’s going to happen next_____. I infer this because…
12. Here’s what I gathered from the text selection…
13. The thing that is so great about _____ is…
14. A deep connection that I had while reading…
15. I remember when…
16. Here are the ways to do…
17. Without a doubt,…
18. The character _____ reminds me of …. because _____
19. If this story had taken place 50 years in the past, the plot may have been different because…
20. No one will argue that…
21. Here are the main concepts that we covered…
22. The text feature _____ helped me to…
23. If I were making the book into a movie, I would delete… and change…
24. Unquestionably, …
25. Three facts I learned while reading…
26. In my experience…
27. The title of the text fits the story well because…
28. It is fascinating to learn about…
29. There are many ways in which…
30. It’s hard to believe this, but…
31. You may be surprised to learn that…
32. Before reading, I thought _____, but now I know that…
33. The main idea of this page is…
34. I would sum up the character’s personality like this…
35. It’s incredible that…
35. For years…
36. Here’s how I would end the story…
37. It’s upsetting when…
38. The author’s purpose for writing this book or chapter is_____. I know this because…
39. Here’s how to understand…
40. It’s amazing to think about…
41. The most interesting part of the book was…
42. Let me briefly explain how to…
43. My favorite part of the book is…
44. I used context clues to figure out the word_____. My strategy was…
45. You will soon discover that…
46. In a nutshell…
47. Let me quickly tell you about…
48. In summary…
49. Here is how I would summarize the main points…
50. When I didn’t understand a part that I was reading, I…
51. The main highlights of the video…
Final Thoughts: Main Idea Sentence Starters
Now you have a ready supply of main idea sentence starters to use during reader’s and writer’s workshop.
Consider reviewing how to find the main idea before assigning these sentence starters for main idea.
Related: main idea writing prompts