FREE Guide to Teaching Text Feature Lessons
Teaching text features lessons in 2nd grade is often like shopping for that person you do not know exactly what to get. Have you ever walked into a store and thought, oh how perfect there are so many pretty frames, figurines, knick knacks- picking out this present will be so easy!” NOT. Sometimes when things are too straight forward and laid out for you that actually makes it harder to think about where to start.
On the surface when you first walk in, teaching text features seem like an easy grab and go lesson. However, once you start to pick out those knick knacks and look closely there is more to think about and decide. There are many layers to teaching text features so let me be your personal shopper and guide you through it.
Download the free teaching text features lessons tips and tricks guide at the button above or here. Keep reading for even more details about fun, engaging ways to teach text features to your students’ little minds and little hearts.
Thinking About Order in Text Feature Lessons
When planning your text feature lesson, think about the prior knowledge of your students. Have they had exposure to some text features? Probably! So start with simple familiar text features that will help them. Let me break down some text features in stages for you to show what I mean.
Basic– title, photograph, illustration, table of contents, heading
Intermediate– caption, bold print, italic print, subheadings, glossary, index, icons, labels, keywords, highlighted text, bullets
Advanced– sidebars, graphs, timeline, map, diagrams, sidebar
Set The Stage for Understanding
My favorite way of teaching reading is to give my students concrete understandings of how the reading skill is seen in our everyday lives. You can do this when teaching text features by explaining how you use signs to navigate where to go, how to find things, and what an area is called.
When you are walking through target and you look up at that aisle sign that says bath and body, you know to turn and walk down that aisle to find your shampoo. (assuming that you aren’t like me and just know where everything in target is even with your eyes closed) That sign hanging above that aisle is a REAL LIFE TEXT FEATURE. It helped you navigate and interpret to best understand. Or if students are in the library they use signs to understand what area to find a book and then specifically what shelf it will be on. Make these connections with you students. Text features are signs to navigate nonfiction information.
Relate using text features to a profession to help bring the skill to life. I use Tito the Text Feature Explorer to engage my students in learning how text features help us to navigate information. The concrete relation with Tito also helps students to discuss text features using his sentence frame. It also creates a meaningful association to help students remember the skill of interpreting text features long after your initial lessons!
Teach One Text Feature at a Time
It is so tempting when you open that perfect text feature mentor text and see that there are 5 text features on that first page alone, you want to teach about all of them right there in that moment. DON’T.
Spend a whole lesson on identifying captions. Take the time to notice are they always under the picture? Are they ever next to the photograph? What does the size and font of the caption look like compared to the rest of the page? What makes the caption stand apart? How long is a caption? Does every caption give us new information? Does every picture have a caption? You make sure that your students can identify captions any time, any where before you move on to the next text feature!
I use interactive modeling to lead my students in discussions about the text and interpreting a specific text feature as we are reading. This is a way for me to model think alouds to show how I notice and interpret text features as I am reading. The lesson structure also encourage students to use a
The exception to this is depending on your students’ age and background knowledge they may not need a lot of time on titles and photographs. As always, do what is best for your students.
Note on using text feature posters:
It is helpful for your students to see the text features in context of a text. A visual representation is helpful to jog students memory and for reference but should not be the main source of learning.
It is helpful for your anchor charts to be on the same topics so students can see how they relate to each other.
Reread Text Over and Over in Text Feature Lessons
Almost every non-fiction book can be used to in text features lessons. You want to make sure that you choose the perfect book for your students and the specific text feature you want to teach. Read more about the criteria you should use when choosing your mentor text here.
REPEAT THE BOOKS. YES, you read that right! Do not keep trying to find new and better nonfiction picture books constantly. If you found a high interest book that your students were engaged with, that has multiple text features throughout, then use it over and over. Each time you reread the text with a new lens of focusing on a specific text feature, students will learn something new from the reading lesson. Each interactive reading lesson will be unique even if the picture book is the same.
For example:
- Read 1- look for headings and how they guide the information to show what we will be learning about in that section
- Read 2- look for photographs– how do they support the focus of that page and show us something that we cannot learn from the words?
- Read 3- look for keywords– what do they mean? how is that definition important to the overall topic?
Continue to Practice Identifying Text Features Anytime Anywhere
Ideas for quick primary text feature lessons:
- If you are reading a nonfiction book for a holiday, point out text features as you notice them. If you are looking in your social studies book at information, direct students to find the caption. Text features are easy to continue to integrate in your lessons so it will stay fresh in our students’ minds. Something as simple as “put your finger on the bolded word to show me that you are finished reading” is reinforcing the reading strategy of text features.
2. Give students a graphic organizer to track text features they notice while reading.
3. Make SSR a fun text feature activity with a scavenger hunt.. You can keep a tally chart hung up and whenever a student notices a text feature in their book, they can show you and add a tally for identifying the subheading in their dog book.
Text Feature Lessons- Practice Identifying vs. Interpreting
Identifying
Identifying text features is when you show students a text feature and ask them to name it or you say find the _____ (photograph, caption, heading, etc.).
Interpreting
Interpreting text features relates more to comprehension and understanding what that text feature does to deliver you important information.
- Knowing the purpose or definition of that text feature
- Understanding what information it conveys
- Why the author chose to use that
- How that text feature relates to the rest of the text
Teaching Text Features Anchor Charts
I find it very important for my students to have somewhere to refer back to what a text feature is called and what it looks like in order to successfully use and understand them.
It is very easy for those little minds to mix up names or forget exact terms so providing them with visual references is a way to increase their confidence and support their learning.
On the wall:
You can have printed, or hand drawn anchor charts showing each text feature. This is great as you are teaching and focusing on those text feature reading lessons.
In a notebook:
I always find it helpful for students to have reference guides in their notebooks incase we need to use the wall space after our text feature unit. So I have students glue mini posters in their notebook or completed interactive notebook pages. To do the mini posters, I print the text feature anchor charts in the picture 4 to a page. I find that when students write in information on an interactive notebook they take more ownership of that resource and internalize the meanings better. Each are great options! Choose what works for your little learners interest and abilities!
Text Feature Activity Ideas
Small group-
- use post it notes to label text features in a text
- give each student a different topic in same series to compare and contrast and each student can find it in their own book at their own pace
Centers, Homework, or even Sub Work!
your students’ individual needs.
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