Ep 67: Teaching Nonfiction: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
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Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hello there! Welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, I'm Rachael your host, glad that you are joining me today. Today, we're going to talk about five ideas for teaching students how to read nonfiction. If you think about it, most of what we read in our life is nonfiction. We read street signs when we're driving, we read recipes when we cook, we read manuals when we're trying to figure out why the heck the vacuum cleaner isn't working right. We read nonfiction all day, every day. Teaching students to read nonfiction texts effectively, whether that's in a book or just in their everyday life, is a reading beast all on its own. There are a lot of moving parts such as identifying text structures and features, using the glossary, referring to headings and subtitles to know when you're going to find the facts that you need, and so much more so. There is a lot going on when it comes to reading nonfiction. Take reading that vacuum menu that I just mentioned a moment ago. You're not going to take the time to read about how to change the bag in your vacuum if you're just trying to figure out why it won't suck up dirt or hair properly, right? Instead, you're going to look in the table of contents to see where the issue you're having is being addressed within the manual. You're going to cut right to the chase. This means we read nonfiction texts a whole lot differently than we read fiction texts. You would never go to Chapter 3 to begin reading a fiction story. You would start from the beginning and work your way to the end. In nonfiction, it doesn't work that way so we need to teach our students that sometimes we can go directly to a section within the textbook. In order to do that, we need to teach students that they can do that and how to do that. Today we're going to cover five ways that you can help your students become more familiarized with a nonfiction text and how to use the different features and the structures to their advantage.
Let's get at it. Before you can do anything else with nonfiction texts, you've got to start at the beginning. For me, I think the beginning is teaching text features. Looking at a page in a nonfiction book is vastly different than a page inside a fictional text. You'll see bold words, headings and subheadings, fact boxes, and so on. We know that the author includes these text features to draw our attention to the important facts. We want our students to be able to immediately find and use those text features to help them understand the text. I actually covered this in a 3 step formula for introducing text features to your students in a blog post that I will link to over at the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/67 but let me give you the highlights here.
One of my most favorite ways to initially introduce students to text features is to have them go on a text feature scavenger hunt. Any time you can make something like this interactive, you're going to really get those students attention and you're going to make it more fun for them. I have them go on a text feature scavenger hunt. After I go over the different types of text features, like those bold words and charts and headings, and I show them several examples which we do this in a mini lesson. I might do a few each day. I will provide students with dozens of books and just let them have at it. They work in teams or partners to try to find as many text features as they can in a specific amount of time. They can either use a checklist if you want to just make it real simple for them to just check off when they find that text feature or you can make it a little bit more advanced recording sheet where you have them not only just say when they find the text feature or where they found it, but what the text feature teaches them. It depends on what level you're working with and where your students are in this journey as far as what their understanding is of text features. This initial activity is great because the main goal here is just to get them to start noticing them. If they don't even notice them and pay no attention to them, they're going to move on to the next page and completely miss the important information that is included in those text features. We want to train them to look for those features, so that is my first activity. Again, I talk about this in that blog post that I'll link to, but a scavenger hunt is a great starting point.
Another awesome activity, my personal favorite because you know, I love LINKtivities! I have a LINKtivity all about text features, where students watch a fun interactive video that introduces the text features. Then I just have several informational slides where they see what these features actually look like. This is a great way to get the text features out in front of them so that they start looking for them on their own. The good news for you today is that this LINKtivity is completely free so I want you to go and grab it. It's over in our Members Resource Library, in the reading section. If you have not yet become a free member, you can do it after you listen to this episode. Just hop on over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/67. I'll have the link to the Members Resource Library there, you can go ahead and grab this LINKtivity in our resource library. It also comes with a little flipbook that the students fill out, it's a great resource for them to then refer to as they get more and more into your non-fiction unit.
All right, the first idea for getting your students to read non-fiction is to teach them the text features. I think the next important element to teaching nonfiction is to help your students to start identifying the text structure of the text itself. First, let's be clear what text structure is. There are five main text structures that authors use to present nonfiction information so they can do it in a descriptive structure. This is where the text describes a topic, an idea, a person or a thing by giving specific information about it. It's very descriptive. The second text structure is sequence, and this is the text that explains steps or events in order to tell how something is done or how something happens. This would be your recipe book. It's a sequential text structure. A compare and contrast text structure shows how two or more things are alike or different. This would be your book that compares alligators to crocodiles and it follows a very specific structure because the author goes back and forth about describing how one animal is this way while the other animal is this way so they're comparing and contrasting. The fourth text structure is cause and effect. This is the type of text where it shows the relationship between cause and effect so if you recycle, this is the effect that we're going to have so anything like that. The last text structure is problem and solution. This text describes and discusses a problem and gives a possible solution to fix the problem, just like it sounds. We've got a descriptive sequence, compare and contrast, cause and effect, problem and solution. When we teach our students to identify the text structure, it will help them to know about how to navigate the text itself. If they know they're reading a compare and contrast book, they know that they're looking for text features and information that is going to tell them how one is different from the other and then their mind is working a little bit differently. They're really focusing in on how one thing is different to the other. Of course, the ability to teach them how to do this is going to be give them repeated exposure and practice. You're going to start by introducing each text structure and giving them multiple examples. That doesn't mean you have to read six books in each type of text structure, but you might choose a few pages from several books and point out how it is a specific text structure. After reading several books or the excerpts from the books illustrating the text structure, I think a great next step is to have students work in small groups to identify the text structure through the books that they're looking through. To do this, I would give them some discussion prompts because this is a little bit more of a trickier concept. The text features, they're pretty easy to find, they can easily see that a word is bolded or italicize or whatever, but it takes a little bit more critical thinking to really decide if a text is a specific structure. I like to give them discussion prompts to help guide their thinking and lead them to identifying the structure correctly.
Here's an example of what one of the discussion prompts might be. Does the author express a concern about a topic? If so, what's the concern and how does the author suggest a way to fix it? If the answer is yes to those questions, if it does address a concern with possible solutions, you know that the possible text structure could be a problem and solution. Another discussion prompt could be, are there several different facts about this topic? If yes, it could be a descriptive text structure or another prompt might be, does the author explain results of changes that happen? If yes, it could possibly be a cause and effect text structure. You can have these discussion prompts on a poster somewhere so as they're going through the book, they can ask themselves these questions over and over, or you can put them each on an individual card, it's completely up to you. Giving them these discussion prompts will help guide them into correctly identifying each structure. If you want to take this one step further, you can do one additional activity within the group, you're going to assign each group just one text structure to really focus on. That group is going to be given a book that's within their text structure and they're going to create a poster that will illustrate how they know this particular book is that particular text structure. Let me give you an example. One group might be given the book Deserts by Gail Gibbons. This deserts book is a descriptive text structure. The students are going to create a poster where they write the title and the author of the book. They're going to explain in their own words what descriptive structure is. Then they're going to design a poster that does exactly that. Since this book is about deserts, they're going to include facts about where deserts are found, plants and animals in the deserts, weather in the desert and any other interesting facts. If they're doing a sequential tax structure, then their poster would likely have some sort of chart on it that shows arrows pointing from one step to another. If the book that they read was a compare and contrast text structure, then their poster would likely have a diagram showing how whatever was discussed in the book and showing the differences using that venn diagram. The idea here is that they read the book together as a class and they take what they know about that text structure and come up with a creative way to present that information in poster form. If you are looking for some books that fall into each different text structure, I'll link to an article over the show notes that gives you some good ideas and some titles to get you started. On top of that, I also have a free student reference sheet over in our Members Resource Library, also in the reading section. It's basically a one sheeter that has all five different descriptions on there with its definition and some clue words that would help the student to identify. For example, on the sheet, the cause and effect text structure, some of the clue words that the students would be looking for is 'as a result' or 'therefore' or 'because of' or 'due to' or 'reason why' or 'consequently'. Those are clue words that students can look for to help identify the text structure. It's just an nice sheet for them to have something to reference over and over as they're starting to learn this new skill. Again, it's free, it's over in the show notes, and I will link to it over there as well.
All right. The third way to really get your students to effectively read non-fiction is to teach reading strategies, reading comprehension strategies, to be more specific, with nonfiction. We, as teachers, often really focus on reading comprehension strategies when it comes to fiction texts, it's very easy to apply those reading strategies to a fictional story. However, we should also be teaching these strategies in nonfiction texts. It just takes a little bit of a spin and you use some different terminology when you're referring to nonfiction and the reading strategies. For example, we have been talking a lot on this podcast, I have a whole series going on right now, all about reading comprehension strategies. I will link to those in the show notes. We've been working our way through them, but today I want to focus specifically through the lens of nonfiction. The comprehension strategies, just as a quick review, are making connections, predicting, questioning, determining importance, inferring, synthesizing, and visualizing. There's seven total. Through the lens of nonfiction, making connections, that might sound like this, what do you already know about the topic? What other books have you read about this same topic? Or how does this issue or topic affect our daily life or society? The predicting comprehension strategy, you might say things like what do you think you will learn in this book instead of what you think will happen? like you would in a fiction. You would start saying, what do you think you're going to learn based on the title, based on the photographs that you see as you do a quick picture walk with the questioning comprehension strategy. You might ask questions like, why do you think the author chose to use that text feature or how does it help you better understand the topic better? Or what questions about this topic do you think will get answered as you read? There's a lot of ways to flip some of that terminology that you would normally use with a fictional text and make it more applicable to nonfiction text. We want our students to be using all the comprehension strategies for both fiction and nonfiction.
All right, the fourth way that you want to start teaching students to read nonfiction strategies effectively is to teach fact and opinion through nonfiction. Nonfiction texts are actually perfect types of books to use when teaching the difference between fact and opinion. Take a book about recycling, for example, Gail Gibbons has a really great one and I'll link it to in the show notes. That book is loaded with facts about recycling, the process of recycling, the benefits of recycling and so on. However, before, during, and after reading the book, the conversation can easily lead into a discussion on the opinions about recycling, why everyone should be doing it or why not. Recycling is wrong and harmful to the environment. Gayle Gibbons is going to give you a lot of facts about recycling and that is going to give us the opportunity to develop our own opinions about recycling based on the facts. You want to be bringing that reading skill, a fact and opinion into your nonfiction texts. Take the opportunity to talk about how many authors use their nonfiction books to teach others about their passions on a non-fiction topic. You can present the facts that support their opinions. You can easily create a simple fact and opinion T chart on a poster or on a smart board or whatever you're using and help students see the facts and opinions about a non-fiction topic side by side.
All right, lastly, we're going to talk about the fifth way to help your students effectively read non-fiction. This last idea is something that you would do at the end of your nonfiction unit, although you're never done reading nonfiction but it might be done at the end of a unit where you're solely focusing on nonfiction. This is a great cumulative activity. After weeks of practicing any skill, I always like to have my students put it together in a tangible way. When we exclusively teach about nonfiction, one of the ways that I did this was have my students create a nonfiction reading guide. I presented this activity to my students that, you know, now that we've been learning so much about nonfiction, they're the experts and that they're going to create this ultimate guide about nonfiction that they could give to somebody else who might not know about how to read nonfiction. Inside this book, students would record all of the things that they've learned. I have a guided template that they would fill out so it wasn't just an empty page or book of papers that they would put together on their own. I had it mapped out so that they would write down different text features and they would outline the different nonfiction text structures and things like that. By putting together this guide and completing it, students would have a great review of everything that they learned in our nonfiction reading unit. I actually have the template that I use, I'll link to it in the show notes if you want to check it out and use it with your own students. I also have several other resources all about using nonfiction in the classroom. I have a complete unit about it that walks you top to bottom with how to introduce what it is and a lot of the activities that we discussed today. I also have a starter kit about teaching nonfiction to your students and some resources that you can provide for your students there. I also have that nonfiction reading guide template that I just mentioned a moment ago so I'll link to all of those resources in the show notes and be sure to grab those free resources that I've mentioned. The nonfiction LINKtivity that I talked about in the text structure reference guide that students can use as well. Lots of goodies for you over on the show notes today. Make sure you head over there at classroomnook.com/podcast/67.
All right. Let's take our one quick lap around and review all the things that we've learned here real quickly before you head out to your day. We've been talking all about five ideas that you can use in your classroom to really help your students read nonfiction effectively. The first idea is to explicitly teach students text structures. You can do it by things like a scavenger hunt and that LINKtivity that I mentioned so that you're training your students to always look for the text features, that way they're not overlooking them. The second activity is to help students identify text structure, when we do that, we read it differently. We are looking for the cause and effect if we know it's a cause and effect structure. We're looking for the sequential steps in order to help our minds process something that is done in a specific order so we help them to identify the text structure. The third way to help students read effectively with nonfiction is to teach them how to use reading comprehension strategies with nonfiction. We just change our vocabulary terms a little bit when we start talking about making connections with nonfiction versus making connections with fiction and so on, all the other strategies as well. Then we talk specifically about fact and opinion through nonfiction. We really hone in on this skill that we teach our students that often our opinions about something of a nonfiction topic is supported by the facts. We teach how these work side by side. Lastly, a great 'put it all together' activity is to have students create a nonfiction reading guide where they put everything that they've learned into one reference guide that they can use over and over as they're reading nonfiction texts. It's just a great way to bring it all together full circle, everything that they've learned.
We've learned a lot today and I hope that you can take at least one of these tips and ideas into your own classroom. If you are loving what you are hearing here on the podcast, please take a quick moment and review it over in iTunes and leave a five star review so the other teachers can find us as well and we get more people on our classroom commute into school.
All right. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. I can't wait to be back again with you next week on another episode. Bye for now.
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