Exploring Nonfiction Text Features

Nonfiction texts can seem a little overwhelming at first. Encouraging students to view a nonfiction book in terms of its parts or features can help quite a bit. The very first thing that students should understand about most nonfiction texts is that they don't need to read every word from start to finish. A nonfiction book can be compared to a grocery store. You buy what you need. You don't need one of everything. In a nonfiction book, you read the parts that you need. Of course, there are times when it does make sense to read a nonfiction selection straight through, such as when you want to learn everything you can about a particular subject, but in most cases, students are using nonfiction texts to find specific information.

Understanding text features can help students to find the information they need quickly and effectively. Here are some ideas for how to help your students as they explore nonfiction texts.

The table of contents 
Teach students to scan the table of contents for chapters or sections that look useful. Often, children and adults skip this step in favor of thumbing through the book looking for relevant chapter headings and subheadings. Here is a fun experiment way to show your students how useful the table of contents can be. Give everyone the same text book. Split the class in half and have one half find a specific piece of information using the table of contents and have the other half do it by thumbing through the book. It should become blatantly clear which method is more effective.

Headings and Subheadings
These may serve to hold the reader's interest, but in most nonfiction texts, their purpose is the give the main idea of the following section. One way to demonstrate this concept is to have students quickly go through one chapter reading only the headings and subheadings. Then ask what information they think they would find if they read the entire chapter.

Illustration, photos, and captions
Pictures make the text come alive. They are also a great opportunity to help your students dig deeper into the subject at hand. Here are some questions to ask students about a specific picture:

• How is this picture related to the main text?
• What can you learn from this picture that you can't from the text?
• Would a different picture be better on this page? If so, why and what would the picture be of?
• Does this picture make you want to read the text (as a side note, editors know that people tend to look at the picture first, then read the caption, and then read the text...IF they are still interested, so often pictures are picked specifically to hold the reader's interest)?
• Is the caption interesting? Does it help you to understand the picture better?

Maps, Diagrams, Graphs, Tables, and Charts
These types of features are great because they not only grab your attention, they can also hold a great deal of information. Here are some things ideas for what to do with one of these features:

• Use the questions above adapted for the feature you are focusing on.
• Orally or in writing, have students state everything they have learned from a specific map, diagram, graph, or table. Don't rush this. Give them the time and encouragement to find every nugget of information. In addition to learning more about the subject at hand, this is a terrific exercise in fluency and possibly inference, depending on the image you are using. 
• Without showing students a given page, read the text to them out loud. Then tell them that the page includes a map (or diagram or chart). Ask them what they think the map shows. Get many different ideas, or if one ideas seems to be prominent, explore that idea to find out what features the students think would be featured on the map. Then compare the students' predictions with what is actually on the page.

Sidebars and Fact Boxes
These popular features are showing up more and more in children's nonfiction text, mainly because they tend to grab attention and are a great way for the author to fit in information that would not go easily into the main narrative. Here are some questions to ask when reading sidebars:

• What is the main idea of this sidebar? Can you summarize the sidebar?
• How is this sidebar related to the main text?
• Why do you think the author made this information a sidebar instead of putting it into the main text?
• Is this sidebar important? Is it interesting?

Font Styles, bullet points, and quotations
Students should know that each of these features can add to their understanding of the text. Here are some questions to ask:

• Why is this part of the text in red (or highlighted, italicized, bolded etc.)?
• Why did the author choose to give this information in bullets points instead of in paragraph form?
• How is the person who is quoted important? What purpose does he or she serve?
• Is the quote interesting? Does it add value to the text? How?

The Glossary
Make sure that younger students know that most nonfiction texts do include a glossary and that they can find  definitions for bold printed words from the text there. They can't use the tool if they don't know about it. One way to extend a glossary activity is to have students use the words they are looking up in sentences.

The index
Indexes can be a great place to find specific answers, but indexes vary by quality quite a bit. Help older students to evaluate an index to decide if it is worth using. A good index lists only important people, places, dates, events, and concepts. Further, it includes subheadings so that the reader is not faced with a long list of page numbers for a given term. Make sure that you are using a text with a good index when you teach index use. One of the most motivating ways to teach students to use an index is to do it in a scavenger-hunt type activity. Give students a list of questions. They must use the index to find the answers, noting page numbers.

Time lines, Fun Facts, For Further Exploration, Activities, etc.
Make sure students know to check the back of the book for what could be a goldmine of valuable and interesting information. Often, these features go unread because no one finds them. Of special note is the "For Further Exploration" section, which may be called by other names, but usually lists other resource materials related to the subject. The Internet resources can be particularly valuable as they can be utilized immediately, as opposed to the books and periodicals, which will probably require a visit to the library.
Hopefully, this post gave you some ideas for creating lessons and activities. If you need it right now, consider these two resources:

Nonfiction Text Features Task Cards

Nonfiction Worksheets and Projects

*While I write about a variety of topics, I feel especially qualified to write about nonfiction since I am also a nonfiction children's author. Having written or given instructions for all of these features, I have an in depth understanding of how they are used to convey information.

FREE Presidents' Day Task Cards!

This set Presidents' Day task cards is a great way for your students to learn some fun facts about the presidents while practicing their higher-level thinking skills. Each card includes a piece of presidential trivia along with a creative or critical thinking challenge. These would work well at a center and are perfect for those fast finishers!

Download your free Presidents Task Cards

Rachel Lynette

Frame Games for your Students

Here are some fun puzzles to try with your students. You can get 90 frame game puzzles in printable worksheet format here.

To see the answers hold your mouse button down and highlight the blue rectangle.

 Double Play 

 Calm before the storm 

Thanks a lot

 Sick in bed 

 Easy on the eyes 

Foreign language

 High chair 

  In between jobs 

 Downtown 

 Railroad crossing 

 You're under arrest 

 One in a million 

 Space invaders 

 Add caption 

 Big bird 

 Read Between the Lines 

Valentine's Freebies!

Just in case you missed them, here are two Valentine's Day Freebies.

Valentine's Logical Thinking Activity

Free Valentine's Mad Lib

If you want more, you can spend $3.00 and get this pack of 12 Valentine's Day Activities. There is a nice mix of ELA and math, all with an emphasis on higher level thinking.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Inference Board named Pin of the Week!

I was so thrilled to find out that PediaStaff named my Inference Pinterest Board as their Pin of the Week! PediaStaff  places pediatric therapists in schools, clinic, and hospitals throughout the country. In addition to their highly informative blog, they also have a huge Pinterest account with over a hundred boards with pins pertaining to education, child rearing, special needs, and various kinds of therapies. If you are a teacher or a parent, they are very much worth following.

The Inference Board they featured is full of pins of interesting pictures. Below each picture there is an inference question that you can pose to your class. If your school blocks Pinterest, you could make the images into a PowerPoint to use with your class. Just make sure you only use it with your class so that you do not violate the copyrights of the people who created the pictures.

20 Great Valentine's Day Writing Prompts

Here are some interesting writing prompts to try with your students this week:

1. Write about a person that you love. What makes this person special?
2. We often say that we "love" something. For example, "I love chocolate." What is the difference between loving a  person and loving a thing or activity?
3. Do you think that animals feel love? Do you think a dog can feel love? A cat? What about a cow, a snake, or a slug? What makes you think so?
4. Make a list of ways you could show your parents that you love them. 
5. Why do you think that love is often associated with the heart as opposed to other organs in the body?
6. Write about a time when you felt loved. 
7. Write a paragraph to convince people that a stapler is the most romantic Valentine's gift you could ever give to someone.
8. Pretend you have been put in charge of your class's Valentine's Day party. What would you plan to do? What would you plan to eat?
9. What does it mean to "have a heart of gold?" Do think that you have a heart of gold? Why or why not?
10. Do you want to get married when you are an adult? Why or why not?
11. Do you like celebrating Valentine's Day? Why or why not?
12. Finish this sentence 50 different ways: I love...
13. Make a Valentine for the fictional character of your choice.
14. Write a definition of love.
15. Pretend that Valentine's Day has been outlawed. Write a paragraph to convince the the people who make the laws to make it legal again. 
16. The answer is, "Valentine's Day. Write five different questions. 
17. Would you rather not get any valentines on Valentine's Day or not get to eat any Valentine's Day treats on Valentine's Day?
18. What does it mean to "put your heart" into something? What is something you have put your heart into?
19. Make a list of as many things as you can that are either pink or red. 
20. How would the world be different if people could not feel love?

Reading Strategies Link Up!

I enjoyed writing my post on Ideas for Using Inference so much that I thought it would be fun to do a link up for Reading Strategies! I am using the term Reading Strategies to refer to strategies students can use before, during, and after reading to improve their understanding. Some examples include: visualizing, questioning, making connections (text to self, text to text, text to world), finding the main idea, summarizing, and predicting. 

Hopefully, you will find many great ideas to use with your students here. If you have a Reading Strategy blog post or freebie, you are welcome to link it up! Just follow the guidelines below. Of course I would also be thrilled if you became a follower of Minds in Bloom.

Hey, Girl...

Taking a little break from the serious...

If you haven't stumbled across them yet, there seems to be a "Hey, Girl" trend using pictures of actor Ryan Gossling. Though not really a fan, I thought the "Hey, Girls" were so funny, I created a whole Pinterest Board of them. But, I couldn't just stop there, so I created a few of my own. Hope they amuse you.

Tips for Teaching Inference

Inference can be a tricky reading strategy to teach, which is a bit ironic since most of us are constantly inferring things about the world around us, and have been since a fairly young age. The trick is to help kids learn how to do it with text. Here are some suggestions for helping your students to learn this skill.

Be sure your students know what inference is (and what it isn't)
Inference is using facts, observations, and logic or reasoning to come to an assumption or conclusion. It is not stating the obvious (stating the obvious: that girl is wearing a fancy dress and carrying a bouquet of flowers. inference: that girl is a flower girl in a wedding). It is not prediction, though the two are definitely related. Remind your students that inference asks "What conclusions can you draw about what is happening now?" Prediction asks, "What will happen next?"

Let them know they are already experts
Find ways to show how they infer things all the time. Here are some fun suggestions for demonstrating this idea:

• Come to school in a T-shirt from an event such as a charity run, concert, or theater performance. Ask the students what they can infer from your clothing choice. 
• Ask the principal or another administrator to come into your classroom at a time that looks unexpected to your students. Have a short, whispered conversation off to the side, during which you point at the fire alarm in your room and then look at your watch (or any other scenario that makes sense). After the administrator leaves, ask the students what they think the two of you discussed.
• Have a student stand in front of the class and ask what the rest of the students could tell about him if they did not already know him, just by looking. For example, his eyesight is not very good (he is wearing glasses). He likes the Sea Hawks (he is wearing a Sea Hawks T-shirt). He walked in some mud on his way to school (there is some mud caked on his shoes). 

Use pictures

Picture books are, of course, a wonderful source for pictures that can be used for inference. They make a terrific bridge from pictures to text. Here is a list of  Inference Picture Books from Amazon. Before you read the text, ask the students what they can learn from the pictures. Comics is another great source for inference pictures. Cut or block out the captions and speech bubbles and have your students discuss what they see. If you are looking for a great inference warm-up, you might want to check out my Inference Pinterest Board.

Ask questions
Ask inference questions while reading aloud, both literature and nonfiction selections across the curriculum. Teach students to use inference questions when reading independently.  Robert J. Marzono in his excellent article in Educational Leadership suggests using the following four questions:

• What is my inference?
• What information did I use to make the inference? 
• How good was my thinking?
• Do I need to change my thinking?

Make it a challenge

Have students practice creating inferences as well as identifying them by issuing an Inference Challenge. You could do this orally, but it would make a terrific writing an assignment. Basically, an Inference Challenge is another way to teach, "show don't tell." Some examples of Inference Challenges:

• Create a character who is very smart without actually saying he or she is smart.
• Write about a very cold afternoon without saying that it is cold.
• Write about an old car without saying that it is old.
• Write about somewhere that is scary without saying that it is a scary place.

Make it fun

Coming up with inferences is a bit like solving a puzzle or a mystery. Older students will enjoy Two Minute Mysteries by Donald J. Sobel. Try reading one to the class as a warm-up or when you have a few extra minutes. For younger children, check out this set of 101 Online Inference Riddles from Phil Tulga. These would be great for independent learning at a computer station. And of course, you can also check out my Inference offering: Two sets of Task Cards, one for grades 3-6 and one for grades 1-2. 

Inference Cards for Grades 3-6

Inference Cards for Grades 1-2

How do you teach inference? Please share your thoughts! 

SCOOT Solutions for When You Have More Students than Cards

If you use task cards to play the game SCOOT with your class, one problem you might have is having more students than cards. Here are some easy ways to solve this problem while also giving your students' brains a little break. If you don't know how to play SCOOT, it is a game that both teachers and students love. Scroll down for instructions.

Add Mini-Break Cards. 
I created this set of free Mini-Break Cards that will work great with any task card set for almost any grade level. Just intersperse the number of Mini-Break cards you need with the task card set you are using and have students do the activities on individual white boards or scratch paper.

Play Boggle
Use this free Boggle template to create a boggle game. Copy it for the number of extra stations that you need for your SCOOT game. When students get to a Boggle station, they use the back of their answer sheet to record the words that they find. Since the same Boggle board is at each station, students can continue their list of words. If you think this will give them too long looking at one Boggle board, you could use several or even a different one for each station.

Do Word Searches
Copy enough different word searches to cover the extra stations you need. When a student gets to a Word Search station, he or she works on that word search for the allotted time, making sure to cross off the words that he or she finds. By the end of the game, everyone will have contributed to solving each word search.

Do Puzzles
There are all kinds of fun little manipulative puzzles that you could put out at extra stations. Consider Tangrams, a Soma cube, or pattern blocks. You only need one or two puzzles per station since the time is short.

Work in Pairs
Instead of having one child at each station, have students move in pairs. Then you will only need half as many cards. You could allow students to work together to answer the question on the card or have them work independently and just move together. If you want students to have a different partner each time split your students into two groups. Put a student from each group at each station. Have students in group 1 move to the left with each rotation and have students in group 2 move to the right. It sounds complicated, but if you practice the rotation a few times before you play, your students will know what to do.

Work on a Class Art Project
Maybe you are making one of those projects where students use a finger to make little cups from squares of tissue paper and glue them onto a picture. Maybe you are making a banner with bubble letters that need to be colored in. You could label your extra stations, "Art Project" and when students come to those stations they go to the back table and work on the project for that rotation, a few at a time.  You could even group the Art Project stations so that students have a decent period of time to work before they rejoin the SCOOT game.

Instructions for SCOOT:

Give each student a pre-made answer sheet or have them number a piece of notebook paper for the number of cards in the set you are using. Distribute the task cards so that each student has one card on his or her desk. Students begin by answering the question on the card that is on their own desk. After an appropriate amount of time (perhaps 2-3 minutes, depending on the age of your students and the cards you are using) the teacher says, "SCOOT,"  and all of the students move to the next desk where a new card awaits them. Continue until every student has completed every card (or until you run out of time). 

Get FREE Mini-Break Cards Here

Find out more about using Task Cards with your class here

Check out the Task Cards in my 
TpT Store here

Special thanks to Randy who inspired these ideas as well as the SCOOT Mini-Break Cards.


This post is on the Link Up Party at The Cornerstone's  Best February Teacher Freebies where you can find more terrific freebies!