The Power to Zoom In.

On Wednesday morning I teach comprehension strategies to my students and I have recently began teaching non-fiction text features to my students.  My hope is that they will be able to use their new knowledge of text features to complete a social studies research report on Ancient Cultures.  Except I am not interested in the typical research report format...(You know the one...paragraph one: introduction, paragraph two: daily life, paragraph three: government, paragraph four: social structures...etc.)  I haven't finalized my plan yet, but I want to them to research the typical categories and then present their knowledge in each category using a different text feature. (timelines, diagrams, labels, glossaries, etc.)

If you aren't familiar with Adrienne Gear, she has published several books on teaching reading comprehension strategies that are very teacher friendly.  You could pick up the book tonight and teach a lesson out of it tomorrow.  She calls the strategies 'Reading Powers,' and the Power to Zoom In equates to teaching students to identify text features of non-fiction books.  I have been following her ideas and lessons in my quest to teach the concept of text features before I let them loose on the research component.

Tomorrow my students will take on the non-fiction feature search - finding examples of different text features in a variety of non-fiction books that I pulled at random from the library.  Next week they will be creating their own samples of the different text features from texts that don't have any.  More to come on that.