Thursday Throw Down: Non-Fiction Text Structure

Today and tomorrow are work days for my district, I chose to take them off and spend more time with my boys.  I prepared everything for Monday the Friday before break.  Since the baby is napping and the boys have finished cleaning the playroom and have earned tv time back I have few minutes to link up with Erin from I'm Lovin' Lit for her Thursday Throw Down linky,

I love using interactive lessons in my classroom and I enjoy mixing them with cooperative learning structures as well.  Before break we were revisiting the skill of Non-Fiction Text Structure.  The first time I taught this some of my kids struggled with the application of the skill.  They could easily recall the different types of structures but struggled a bit identifying them within a text.

I was SUPER excited to find Deb Hanson's NonFiction Text Structure Craftivity!  This product was just what my kids needed and I combined it with a few cooperative learning structures to make it interactive for my kiddos.

I ran a set of passages for each team, there were five sheets of passages, and had teams use Kagan's cooperative learning structure round table to complete the passages.  Each student read the first passage on the page they were provided. They then identified the text structure by labeling the passage.  Students then passed the papers around the team (the fifth page was in the middle so #1 took from the middle, #2 got #1's paper, #3 got #2's, #4 got #3's, and #4 put their paper in the middle of the team) read the second passage and identified the text structure.  Teams continued this structure until all passages were labeled.

Once all teams had read and labeled all the passages I gave them a hint that there were four different structures for each page, therefore if they had two passages labeled with the same structure on the same page they needed to go back and reread and relabel the passages.  They were very disappointed to find out that not all the passages were descriptive, this was their favorite structure to use :)

On the second day I went over the answers to the passages to review the skill and provided each team with the clipboard pages and a large sheet of construction paper to create their team craftivity. Teams then worked together to color, cut, and paste to create their team posters.

My students had a better understanding of text structure and identifying the difference in several of them.  The one they struggled with the most was Cause and Effect, Deb's product provided several examples for them to see this structure in action.  I have to tell you I was so excited for how well my students did and enjoyed this product that I emailed Deb immediately after school that day to thank her for such an amazing product!

If you are teaching this skill or need to review you can purchases Deb's product HERE.

I also wanted to remind you that my store is still 20% off until tomorrow!  I recently added my newest Science Interactive Notebook: Phases of the Moon. :)