Ms. Powell's Management Ideas For Teachers

WHY USE INFORMATIONAL TEXTS?

Most of what your students read outside of school is nonfiction

The venn diagram in the photo above shows how little overlap there is between the materials we use to teach kids to read and the materials that they actually need to comprehend in their everyday lives.

90% of what the average adult reads is nonfiction

It's our job to prepare students for adulthood, and almost everything grown-ups read is informational: newspapers, catalogs, internet searches, signs, directions, recipes, menus, and so on. These are the things we must teach children to understand.

For your male students

Barnes and Noble reports that 85% of males purchase nonfiction reading materials, while 80% of females purchase fiction materials. Who are typically the poorest readers in your class? Boys! If you want to get your boys interested in reading, you must give them books they want to read... and they want to read about the world they live in.

I use this book pocket chart to hold research and reference materials that don't fit well on bookshelves: menus, magazines, newspaper articles, cookbooks/recipes, and so on. You can purchase this pocket chart here.

TEACHING KIDS INFORMATIONAL TEXT STRUCTURES

Introductory Activity: Read a favorite nonfiction selection to students. Begin a list of text features (captions, charts, headings, etc.) on a chart. Add to the chart throughout the year as students identify additional features. This will help them recognize the genre and know when to apply the strategies they learn for reading it.

BUILDING BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE AND VOCABULARY PRIOR TO READING

MONITORING PACE: STOPPING WHEN YOUR HEAD IS FULL

Many children assume that they can read non-fiction at the same brisk pace they use when reading a fictional story. They need to be explicitly told how important it is to slow down and process the fact-heavy format of nonfiction texts. Model for students how to 'stop when your head is full' and make sense of what you've been reading.

TEACHING KIDS TO SKIM AND SCAN

TRANSFERRING SKILLS TO NEW TEXTS/ REAL SITUATIONS

-When will you use this strategy again to help you as you read?

-If we had a new student in our class, what would you tell them about __?

-When will you use this again when you're not in school?

-We've practiced this strategy like this and like this. But the real reason we do this is __. Could we use this strategy tomorrow with another book?

REAL WORLD READING

Introductory Game: Have students search their backpacks and desks for the following items (without telling them what they're for): trading cards (baseball, Yu-Gi-Oh); candy; money; book order form; make-up, etc. Have students deduce what all of these items have in common (they all have writing on them: they are all informational text).

Book Order Forms: Use Scholastic book orders as a teaching tool to incorporate math into authentic reading tasks. Give students an imaginary $10 to spend and have them complete the form (on extra copies or notebook paper). Or, reinforce genre study by having students circle an example of realistic fiction selections, put a square around a biography, etc.

Time For Kids/ Scholastic News/ Weekly Reader: Have students hole punch and keep in a three-inch binder so they have an entire collection of them. As corresponding topics arise in your curriculum, ask students to go back into their binders and find a graph that uses percentages; a map that shows populations, etc. You can keep one or two binders each year and have an extra set to reference.

Science Experiments: Complete investigations to build background knowledge and give students firsthand experience with key vocabulary. THEN, use tradebooks (or even the textbook) to read about what they did.

When I went to a local museum this summer, I grabbed a class set of various tourist attraction brochures. The kids use these as part of group projects to plan an imaginary trip and calculate cost, determine hours the site is open, plan the times for visiting each event, etc. I also have a class set of the local bus schedule. These can be used for math assignments as well as real-world reading practice.

I encourage the children to bring in current event articles as often as possible and spend lots of time discussing them in class. I want the children to read the newspaper with adult assistance and look up information online because those are important skills I hope they will continue to use into adulthood whenever they want to learn more about their world.

MORE RESOURCES

Free Science Reader's Theater (yes, science!) from Adrian Bruce