Students retain information a lot better when their lessons are interactive and engaging. Teaching kids about text features and reading comprehension and finding ways to make these lessons interactive is a great way to really assist students during guided reading and nonfiction reading sessions. In this article, you will find fun examples to integrate text feature activities into your classroom.
There are tons of different ways to turn lessons about text features into fun tasks that make teaching nonfiction a lot easier for everyone involved.
We want to assist our kids in learning how to manage nonfiction work, and any resources that help them better comprehend nonfiction text features, spot them, and make use of them is a great way to reinforce the concepts you are trying to teach them.
Examples of How to Integrate Text Feature Activities into Your Classroom
We need to impart the importance of text features and what they signify when we show young students how to navigate nonfiction resources. They need to know that charts, graphs, illustrations, and more also provide valuable information not found directly within the texts.
Create Charts
A practice that will help guide students is to work with them to create a chart that details different text features, the information they can impart, and where to look for them. Keeping this chart on the wall of your room gives students easy access to this valuable information.
Use this free features chart template below and create your own chart with so many different text features. You can even let your students create one in small group activities. You can use this template also for the other text feature activities below.
Highlight Text Features During Readings
Another awesome way to help students spot and understand text features is to highlight them in any reading session. Say you are reading a nonfiction work to the class. When you hit an element in nonfiction texts, stop and show the kids where it is, what type of element it is, and the information it is trying to impart.
Text Features Gallery Walk
Another fun and interactive way to show students text features in nonfiction books is to go on a text features walk. This is a fun way to read for your students to search out specific text features in w wide range of works.
In this practice, you would give one or a group of students a specific book and a list of text features to locate and highlight. The more they do this, the more they internalize the concepts, and the easier it will be for them to locate elements on their own in their later reading.
Text Features Puzzles
Hands-on activity is another highly effective way to help impart lessons to students that they will retain. For a text features puzzle, you do a small puzzle out of the text feature’s name. It’s the definition and a visual example.
The goal for the students is to put the puzzles together for each category correctly. This is a good combination of interactive learning that will allow them, by themselves or in small groups, to locate important text features and understand what type of information is being conveyed in each.
