Nonfiction Text Features

Non-fiction can be tricky for emergent readers but it is sooo important!  Talk about student engagement. What kid doesn't love looking at a book full of creepy crawlers or jungle animals?  As elementary teachers, I feel like we spend most of our instruction teaching with fiction books.  Let's face it, fiction books are EVERYWHERE...showcased in book stores, flyers for book orders, garage sales, and even in Kohl's! While teaching with fiction books is important, non-fiction is just as important!  With limited time for Science these days, I find that integration is key.  Non-fiction texts fit nicely into a Reading/Writing block and you are essentially killing two birds with one stone!

My kids have always chosen non-fiction books for their book baggies each week from our classroom library and the definitely choose non-fiction when we go to the school library.  The interest has always been there. I am guilty of being a fiction book hoarder...most bins in my classroom and personal library are fiction.  I have one measly non-fiction bin.  EEEKKK!!!!!  This year, I have made a conscious effort to order several non-fiction books from Scholastic with my points each time I send a book order home.  That way, I am constantly adding to my one bin with the hopes of it becoming two very soon!  Do you have a lot of non-fiction texts in your library??  Where do you like to get your books?

We've been busy diving into non-fiction.  Because The Common Core State Standards require that children have to be able to "know and use various text features to locate key facts of information in a text," we've been hitting it hard.  We started out reviewing non-fiction and reading a non-fiction book.  Then, I gave the kids stacks {small stacks from my one, measly non-fiction bin} of books for them to look through. The next day, I introduced one text feature from my "Snapshot of Non-fiction" pack.  I began with table of contents because that seems to be pretty simple for kids and they have seen it in a lot of books.  We discussed how the table of contents helps the reader and talked about how when you are reading a non-fiction book, you do not have to read it in order. The table lets you skip around to the parts you are most interested in.  I modeled finding a table in a book and filled out the table of contents page in our notebooks. Then, the stacks of books went out again and kids went on a table of contents hunt.

We continued on as the week progressed, we moved onto glossary, photographs, and types of print.  There was a constant every day before I introduced a new feature:  we would review all the previous features.

This week, we're wrapping up with labels, captions, and a few others.  By the end of our study, the kids will be able to identify each feature and state what each means.

Next up, non-fiction {"All About"} writing!  I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!  MY FAVORITE UNIT OF STUDY IN WRITING!

xo
Megan