Looking for a way to work on "Main Idea"?

Something sort of odd happened to me today. During a demonstration of the program, I was asked whether a science lesson in Skills Tutor would read the text on the page. I said, "Let's click on it and see." Not all Skills Tutor pages work in exactly the same way. Some read passages sentence by sentence, some read the entire page, and some read a summary of what is on the page. Science is one that reads a summary of the page. 

While it was reading the summary or main ideas of the page, it occurred to me that this could be a great way to work on identifying main idea or summarizing.

Here's the suggestion. Assign a science lesson that you think would be interesting to your kids. We used the lesson on the cell in Science I. Either have them all bring the page up, or, if you have the technology, bring it up on a projector or smart board. Have the kids read the contents of the page; a process which will take about three minutes. Then, have your students write a quick summary of what the main or most important ideas on this page were. Next, click on the text on the page and it will read its summary out loud. It's a quick way for the student to do some self evaluation to see if they were correct. There should be about three pages at the beginning of any science lesson which will operate in this way, and when you get to the point where your students are having to answer science questions, you can either choose to have them answer, or you could exit that activity and go to another.

Keep in mind that the Science lessons are leveled for high school, but are frequently used in middle school and occasionally lower. The vocabulary may be too difficult for lower grades. I'd love to hear from you in the comments if you try this