Informational Text

Our skill for reading this coming week is "Informational Text".  Using the South Carolina standards that means my students should be able to "read and comprehend print and non-print informational text."

We will begin by creating a anchor chart similar to the one I found from Second Grade Style:

Another great resource for text features is the wealth of information from Scholastic's very own Beth Newingham.  She wrote a fantastic article on nonfiction reading resources.  She incorporated not only text features but text structure as well.  I'm going to tackle both since I've already covered text features once this year. 

I will use these "slides" to reteach text features

Then, I will use these to focus on text structure.

Finally, have you heard of textmapping?  If not, you need to go over and check out Teaching My Friends.  This activity is a great way to tie in content areas into the literacy block.  Through textmapping, students are given an article (or in this case a few pages from the Social Studies text book) and they color-code the different text features.  Another way to use this activity is to color-code questions and answers from the text as you read.  However, with limited copies, I will laminate my sheets and have the students use different colors of dry erase markers to complete their color-coding.

Text Mapping...GENIUS IDEA

Finally, I found Mastery Connect (yes, there's an app for that):

You need to check out Mastery Connect to see great assessments tied to Common Core Standards.

Mastery Connect continues to add more and more content and "ready made" assessments daily.  I plan on using some of the Mastery Connect assessment questions on text features and informational text this week on our weekly assessment.  Thank you, Mastery Connect!

How do you teach Informational Text?