Central Idea/Detail Frame

1. Pre-select a passage for use with the Central Idea/Detail Frame graphic organizer and provide students with access to the template or have them sketch it in their notebooks.
2. Explain the purpose of the Central Idea/Detail Frame strategy as a tool to help students organize their thinking around topics, main ideas, and supporting details.
3. Instruct students to use the graphic organizer template as they read to note the main ideas that are being conveyed by the text, as well as the essential supporting details that explain or support the main ideas. Students can use or create as many frames as needed for the portion of text they are reading; if a student believes the text conveys two main ideas, the student will create two frames to note these concepts and record essential supporting details for each.
4. Engage students in small group discussions of their Central Idea/Detail Frames through the use of a purposeful Academic Dialogue strategy and use the cumulative results to create an outline of critical information from the text.

• While students may begin with a teacher-provided photocopy of a Central Idea/Detail Frame, the frame should quickly become one that students create independently for use in and out of class.
• When compiled, Central Idea/Detail Frames are a resource for demonstrating student understanding and learning of the content.
• The Central Idea/Detail Frame can be modified to say Claim/Evidence Frame to reflect the language of argument.
• Consider pairing an Academic Dialogue strategy such as Pair-Share or Paired Verbal Fluency to engage students in sharing and discussing their Central Idea/Detail Frame.

Scaffolds for Multilingual Learners

Entering/Emerging:

• Allow students to access and use vocabulary resources in order to recount, argue, and explain.
• Model how to write a variety of responses.
• Provide examples of what students’ responses might look like
• Allow students to respond in a variety of ways (e.g., pictures, text, mix of English and home language, etc.).
• Provide sentence stems/frames and graphic organizers.
• Bold key vocabulary words for students to use to identify icons and match key terms and ideas to images, graphs, icons or diagrams.
• Allow students to access and use vocabulary resources and tools, such as anchor charts, word walls, word banks, and personal dictionaries (including images).
• Chunk the text to make it more accessible for students to sequence events, identify patterns, and locate main ideas.
• When watching videos, turn on captions.

Developing/Expanding:

• Model how to write a variety of responses (e.g., how to compare/contrast, describe a central idea, describe relationships between details or examples and supporting ideas, connect content-related themes or topics to main ideas).
• Provide examples of information presented objectively with a neutral tone.
• Provide graphic organizers to help students with organization of claims and evidence.
• Provide examples of persuasive pieces which contain a series of substantiated claims and evidence.
• Model how to summarize evidence and evaluate and challenge evidence presented in an argument.
• Use ALM’s Interactive Read Aloud–Think Aloud strategy in order to support students’ comprehension of texts for the purpose of recounting, arguing, explaining and/or discussing.
• Model and use Reader Response in order to support students’ comprehension of texts for the purpose of recounting, arguing, explaining and/or discussing.
• When watching videos, turn on captions.

Bridging/Reaching:

• Provide examples of research reports and summaries.
• Model how to write a concluding statement that follows from and supports the information presented.
• Model how to convey sequence and show relationships among experiences and events.
• Pair this strategy with Text Coding with Margin Notes, Double Entry Organizer (DEO), Anticipation
• Guide, and Jigsaw to assist in comprehension of texts.