Teaching Text Features to Support Comprehension

Book excerpt: When K-5 students understand how to read text features like diagrams, bullets, insets, and tables, they are reading the whole page--essential for deep comprehension of nonfiction and fiction text. In this revised edition of Reading the Whole Page: Teaching and Assessing Text Features to Meet K-5 Common Core Standards, seasoned educators Michelle Kelley and Nicki Clausen-Grace show you how to explicitly teach K-5 students to read text features, use them to navigate text, and include them in their own writing. The classroom-proven mini-lessons, activities, and assessment tools in Teaching Text Features to Support Comprehension help you: teach relevant Common Core State Standards and grade-level expectations; diagnose, monitor, and meet student needs with one of two level-appropriate assessments; evaluate knowledge with a unique picture book that can be downloaded that illustrates all the text features; and monitor and guide differentiated instruction with a convenient class profile. Sixty mini-lessons for teaching print, graphic, and organizational features provide ample choices for meeting the standards while adapting to students' needs. Flexible lessons, which follow the gradual release of responsibility model and increase in difficulty, can be used within the typical 90-minute reading block, during content-area instruction, in small groups, and as part of independent practice opportunities like literacy centers. Each lesson offers concept review, suggestions for differentiation, assessment options, and technology connections, requiring students to find, explore, manipulate, and create text features in their own writing. Even more activities--from text feature walks to scavenger hunts--help students integrate text feature knowledge as they read. The downloadable materials provided online include important resources and convenient lesson supports, such as interactive thinksheets that can be filled out directly on the computer, visual examples of each text feature, rubrics, the assessment picture book, and readers' theatre scripts.