Nonfiction: If I say it ten times, it's probably IMPORTANT!

Yesterday, I shared a sample anchor chart to use for main idea. One of the tips to find main idea was to look for clues in repeated ideas. 
This is huge. If you think about how we find the main idea, we really have to consider repeated ideas as important. If an author takes the time to repeat, restate, or reference an idea over and over again, it's a big one. It's also important if there are many pieces of evidence/reasons/examples that connect to it. But this idea which makes sense to adults can be very abstract to little people.

Here's a strategy to use to introduce finding main ideas. You take a song - I chose Octopus's Garden. I'm not sure why. It was literally the first song that popped into my brain when I thought, "What song shall I use?" Here are the lyrics.

I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade
He'd let us in, knows where we've been
In his octopus' garden in the shade

I'd ask my friends to come and see
An octopus' garden with me
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade.

We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves
Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus' garden near a cave

We would sing and dance around
Because we know we can't be found
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade

We would shout and swim about
The coral that lies beneath the waves
(Lies beneath the ocean waves)
Oh what joy for every girl and boy
Knowing they're happy and they're safe
(Happy and they're safe)

We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden with you.

If you read through the song once, you get a general idea of what the song is about - An octopus's garden. But to create a more complete main idea, you read closely and notice what's repeated. In many songs, the chorus is repeated - it's the repeated part of the song where we get the big ideas.  In this song, this is what is repeated: "I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus' garden in the shade/with you." It is specifically about the author's feelings towards the octopus's garden.

The repeated chorus gives us an idea of the main message/idea of the song. In addition to this, the other verses support the chorus, or main idea. Why does he want to be in an octopus's garden? Several reasons.

1. No one there to tell us what to do.

2. Girls and boys know they're happy and safe.

3. We'd be warm, below the storm.

etc.

The other verses support, or provide reasons/examples for the repeated main idea in the chorus. Nice, huh?

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Nonfiction: Main Idea Madness

Main idea is so important. Not just because it's a little skill kids need to answer questions like "What is paragraph 3 mainly about?" because that's not a very good reason. It's because, in nonfiction text, if a student can't identify what's important, they aren't determining importance! They're focusing on what's interesting rather than important. Interesting is ok when reading for enjoyment, but if we're reading for information - a vast amount of our adult reading time is spent reading for information - we need to be able to glean what's important on a large scale.

But it's hard!

This is a very very simple anchor chart we've used with kids to help them think about main ideas. 

I like the "Clues can be in" section because repeated ideas are often very important. There's a reason why the writer chose to repeat that idea/word/phrase so much. IT'S KIND OF A BIG DEAL! So that can be a big clue. 

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Nonfiction: Cause-Effect Text Structure

Our school has spent about a month in an expository unit already, and a lot of the grade levels are currently working on text structures. The structures that third grade works with are sequential order and cause and effect. Fourth grade adds compare-contrast, and fifth grade adds logical order and classification scheme. 

We have worked hard on starting with a tangible experience - something hands-on designed to have the kids notice patterns in language, etc., and then bridging to application in a text. We're trying to scaffold students' understanding of the ideas.

Text structures always seems to be the key for students to really comprehend. I feel like students often read superficially, skimming and browsing through the text, but not really noticing or reading closely enough to consider the relationships between words in sentences, paragraphs, and the overall text. This happens in fiction and nonfiction, but it's especially difficult in nonfiction.

For cause and effect - a difficult standard introduced and tested in third grade, we decided to start with an anchor chart and Mix-Pair-Share activity with statements on cards. This is the anchor chart we created as a sample:

First, kids will recieve a set of cause and effect statements on cards. Each student receives a card. They mix-pair-share to find their cause-effect match. Then, in their partners, they use the sentence stems on the anchor chart to build sentences including their cards.

My favorite part is the sentence stems on the bottom. We're trying to get kids to use the stems in speaking and writing. We're hoping this will help them think about the relationship between ideas and how sentence structures contribute to that.

One common misconception I've found with text structures is where we see them. In the standards, it feels like the entire text will be a cause-effect structure, or a sequence, but in reality, it's usually a few sentences, a paragraph, or a section of text that are organized that way. Several different types of text structures can be used in one text.

To help other teachers out with these topics of nonfiction, I've been working on a Nonfiction Pack that includes these activities as well as many others! I'm super excited about it - it will be my largest reading pack to date! I'll let you know when it's up!

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Expository Text Structures

Our latest plans for nonfiction!
 
In fifth grade, the teachers are introducing expository text structures. The TEKS call for these text structures in fifth grade: cause-effect, compare-contrast, sequence, logical order, and classification theme. The teachers are reading different articles with the kids and searching for the 'signal words' that indicate the relationships between ideas. They'll build this chart as they go! 

At the end, we planned for them to distribute shorts texts to the kids and have them sort them by organizational pattern, and complete the graphic organizer for each one. 

Wish us luck!

To help your kids understand how to analyze text structure, you can check out this Reading Strategy MiniPack on TPT: Analyzing Text Structure! It uses the gradual release model to support kids in understanding how to analyze text structure in expository text. 

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New Unit: Nonfiction Features!

Embarrassing Story:

Today my hunny and I went to Corner Bakery to do a little work on our laptops and enjoy some tasty stuff. I worked away (blogging, creating. You know the business) and he worked as well. He is the photographer for our district, so he was working on editing some pictures of the cute little guys we go to work for every day! At one point, he flipped his laptop around and showed me the most beautiful picture. A little pre-K boy with his tiny little fingers clenched in glee, laughing like he'd never seen anything so funny. I immediately cracked up. This little guy just looked so joyful.

Then I asked, "When did you take this? Why is he laughing so much?" and my hunny said, "It was the first day of pre-K and they were doing Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes during PE as fast as they could."

And this is when I became a smushy puddle of jelly. I started cry! Right there, in the Corner Bakery, I had tears spilling down my face and onto the napkins made of recycled material. Something about the sweetness of a little boy being so excited to do Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes on his first day of school was so moving that I fell apart like a person with a chemical imbalance.

Which I may well be.

Anyway, this is what I intended to blog about: (Don't you love my skill-less transition?)

Actual Blog Content:

One of the more difficult texts for kids to navigate is expository. This is unfortunate, because kids love to read about information and it's such an invaluable skill! I think it's largely due to the lack of experience kids have with informational text. The less exposure they have, the more difficult it is for them to glean information and identify how ideas are related.

My school has begun teaching about expository text this month. For the next several days, I'd like to share with you some of the things that we've planned to do in the expository genre.

To get started, we're helping kids do some basic text navigation by creating this anchor chart. Students often have experience identifying the text features. However, using them is a different story.

Ask a kid, "Where's the caption?" and he can probably point to a caption. Ask the same kid, "How does that help you? Why did the author include it?" and the kid stares blankly. (This is what I call the dead fish look.)

To me, this is a slight flag-raiser. Everything we do is to help our kids understand text and become better readers. If what we're doing doesn't do that... why do it? So to assist in this, we made sure we added a column on our chart entitled "Why was this feature included?"

Once students have learned to identify (and appreciate) the features text has to offer, they need to do these two things with them:

1. Use the features to make good predictions about the text
2. Gather information from the features

To help out with this, I'm sharing a couple of documents that you can use to help kids make and record their predictions and record facts they have learned from features of nonfiction.

Nonfiction Features Scavenger Hunt

Nonfiction Fact Finder 

(I require students to use the nonfiction features to gather information and record them on this organizer.

Nonfiction Prediction Guide with Response Questions

Grab them free at google docs! Pin It