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Raise the Bar Reading
A Reading Teacher's Blog
5 Ways to Practice Nonfiction Text Features
As adult readers, we know the importance of using nonfiction text features in order to help us understand the main body of text. Headings help us to make predictions while reading, and then easily find information after reading. Captions explicitly tell us what we are looking at in a photograph or picture that aligns to the text. An index helps us to find the exact page that contains information on a topic we are researching. The list goes on.
It may seem like common sense to us, but it isn’t for our growing readers. Without explicitly teaching and having students interact with text features, they could be missing out on a huge piece of their own nonfiction reading comprehension puzzle.
5 Ways to Practice Nonfiction Text Features:
1. nonfiction text features scavenger hunt.
2. TEXT FEATURES FLAG
3. TEXT FEATURES GALLERY WALK
A text features gallery walk is a great way to expose students to nonfiction text features in many different layouts of nonfiction texts at one time. Students love that this text features activity gets them up and moving, so that is an added bonus!
Basically, you spread out at least the number of students to books. If you have students work in partners you can do just half the number of students in your class. Each book gets a number card placed right by it. Then, students walk around with a nonfiction text features checklist to check off the text features they see in each book.
4. NONFICTION TEXT FEATURES PUZZLES
5. GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS
I like to have students use graphic organizers while reading nonfiction . This is not only to support them in organizing their ideas, but also for me to check their thought process and understanding. Some organizers include…
- recording pages that a text feature was on and how it helped them,
- making predictions based on a text from skimming text features (cover, timelines, photos, etc.),
- using images and captions to understand the text, and
- creating images and captions to help visualize the text
If interested, I do have a bunch of differentiated nonfiction reading passages in my TpT shop that already come with these types of activities as well. Caption It & Headings Match-Up has students match captions to the images and headings to the text. Another activity has students sort the nonfiction text features from the text and explain how they helped them.
Looking for more resources on teaching nonfiction? Read this blog post on 5 Ways to Teach Nonfiction Text Structure .
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2. TEXT FEATURES FLAG. While reading a nonfiction text or article, students first flag text features so they pay attention to them. This helps them to learn their importance in nonfiction comprehension, and ultimately become more and more aware of seeking them out and internalizing them independently.