The Best Picture Books for Teaching Determining Importance
Who are the top 2 most important people in your life? Wow those names popped into your head fast! How come it is so easy to apply the readings skill of determining importance to our lives and feelings but often much tricker to do with books?!
Well let’s talk about how we are teaching it to our students and what books we are using to do so!
First of all, I am a HUGE advocate for teaching reading strategies in context of a book through shared reading and think alouds. This is a way of teaching that you demonstrate how to apply a reading strategy to a picture book in an interactive read aloud format. Check out my determining importance resource here where I give you everything you need to get started with that type of lesson!
Mentor Texts for Determining Importance
- Whoosh
- The Girl Who Thought In Pictures
- Shark Lady
- For The Right to Learn
- True Colors! The Story of Crayola
- The Innings and Outs of Baseball!
- I Am Rosa Parks
- The Marvelous Thing That Came From a Spring
When choosing a mentor text it is important to consider your students’ interests and reading levels. Since I am reading the picture book aloud to my class, I do not choose books that my students could read independently but I do not want to use a story that is too complex for them to follow.
Each of these books that I suggested has a main point that it is most important information given in the book. This helps you to model determining importance because you can sort out which facts are interesting or important. I often use graphic organizers to help students differentiate between the two and practice implementing the skill. Read more about how I teach determining importance here!
I hope that this list is helpful for you to get started planning your determining importance lessons!
More mentor texts ideas for teaching non- fiction reading strategies:
Affiliate links were used in this blog post.
