What, Why & How: A Useful Analogy for Introducing Text Structure(s) (Part 2)
Posted on March 24, 2025Share This Content
teaching nonfiction comprehension
What, Why & How: Easy Steps for Teaching Text Structure in a Powerful Way (Part 1)
Posted on March 17, 2025Identifying a text’s structure(s) can play a powerful role in comprehension. Knowing the five types of structures is not enough, though. Over several lessons and across time, we have to continually weave in discussions about the what, the why, the how. In part 1 of this series, I share the tools for teaching students to identify a text’s structure in a way that leads to understanding the main ideas in a source.
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Three-Phase Plan for Learning with Informational Sources (UPDATED POST)
Posted on September 10, 2024Teaching our students how to make sense of informational sources can feel overwhelming. With a systematic plan for teaching and learning, we can make this easier for ourselves and our students. Visit this updated post for the latest version of the three-phase plan – Meet the Source, Meet the Strategies, Meet the Response.
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Explode to Explain (Updated)
Posted on February 20, 2024Are your students citing “text evidence” without really having control of the meaning of that evidence? Do they forget to explain further or elaborate? If either of these is the case for your students, they may need to space to contemplate what one detail or quote from the text means. A simple way to do …Read more
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Would a clearer purpose help students identify main ideas?
Posted on February 2, 2021If your students struggle with determining what’s important or they think “It’s all important!” make sure they have a clear purpose for reading. A purpose stated as a question is even better. Questions like “What is the author’s point of view? What are details in the sources that make me think so?” or “How did …Read more
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“I highlighted all the words! They’re all important!”
Posted on October 12, 2016When annotating, do your students underline (or highlight 😉 most of what they’ve read because they think “it’s all important”? Maybe they’ve underlined that much because they don’t know how to determine what is important? Below I describe a Phase 2 demo lesson I gave to tackle this issue – focused on helping students identify …Read more
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Three Phase Lesson – Explaining Supporting Evidence
Posted on August 15, 2016Do your students ever need help with explaining how key details support a main idea? Here are a few thoughts and artifacts from a three-phase lesson I gave. Phase One – Meet the Source The students read the article entitled “Tortoises battle it out with Marines for the right to stay put.” Suggestion – Before …Read more
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How Authors Reveal Different Points of View
Posted on April 15, 2016Here’s a middle school lesson for teaching students to analyze how two authors writing about the same topic may shape their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence or advancing different interpretations of the facts. Preparation Go to Science News for Students and locate an article that cites a study. Most of these articles …Read more
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Writing Authentic Letters as Reading Responses
Posted on February 26, 2016Are your students tired of writing analytical essays? I’m shaking up how students respond to informational texts. I’m experimenting with letters to real people that still nudge students to think about the big ideas in sources. With small groups of 4th and 5th grade students, I explored what writing letters might look like. Here’s the …Read more
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Comparing Text Structures – One Lesson
Posted on February 9, 2016Teaching the language of text structures can help students compare and contrast texts more easily (e.g., The author shares a problem and then several solutions… I noticed the author describes about multiple aspects of the….). What follows is a demo lesson I gave to introduce students to using the language of text structure to help …Read more
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Ever hunt for the perfect texts to teach “text structure” and end up just banging your head against the wall? It’s because texts are more complex than five simple structures, right? In this blog entry I describe an analogy I’ve started using with students to move us beyond this problem.