Moss Teaches

Creating a Thesis Statement

April 23, 2012 | Posted in: Class Updates

Leave a Comment

In school today, we read an article about the American auto industry’s recovery after severe troubles many years ago.  When I asked the students what the article was about, there were any number of possible answers:  cars, the car industry, the US auto industry, the economy, etc.  When the question changed to “What was the main idea of the article?”, the answer had to be more precise.  After all, saying that the main idea of the article was “the US auto industry” isn’t reasonable because “the US auto industry” is a topic, not a main IDEA.  Students learned about the idea of a thesis statement and that it has some specific rules:

  • A THESIS STATEMENT…
    • …is a full sentence.
    • …includes one broad, general fact that represents the article (as a whole).
    • …is a statement that explains what you’ll learn from reading the article.
    • …does NOT start with things like “You will learn…” or “This is about…” or “The main idea is…”
    • …does not use TTQA (turn the question around).
    • …can work as a TOPIC SENTENCE that begins an article.

With respect to the article about the auto industry (which the kids brought home in their Weekly Reader), we created four different thesis statements that all fit the guidelines:

  • The economy is improving business for U.S. cars.
  • The car companies in the U.S. are profitable now.
  • The U.S. car companies are recovering after a few tough years due to a bad economy.
  • In 2004, U.S. car companies were losing profits, but now, their profits have gone up again.
Each of these thesis statements synthesizes information from the article to present one general statement about the message of the whole article.  (Adults, I understand that my definition of a thesis statement differs from scholarly uses of thesis statements, but this works as an introduction for kids.)
Tonight’s homework asks the students to create a shorter thesis statement for the article “Small Wonders”, which is about tiny frogs.  Kids should use the same guidelines that we used to create a joint thesis statement in class.  We will share the kids’ ideas tomorrow.
(As an aside, I will be out of school tomorrow to stay home with a sick toddler! 🙁  See you Wednesday, hopefully!)

Leave a Reply