Teaching Students How to Research for an Animal Book Report by Using Nonfiction Text Features
Have you noticed that even when we do a good job teaching Nonfiction Text Features to our students, many times they fall short when they actually need to use them to find information?
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| Use Animal Books to reinforce the use of Nonfiction Text Features |
Writing Animal Book Reports is a great way to promote the authentic reading behaviors we want our students to have!
Researching is the perfect opportunity to guide our young readers through the many Nonfiction Text Features available to them!
The best way to do that is by using your students questions for the book report, to model your behavior as a reader when you search for information.
Reading Behaviors to Remind Your Students Of:
👉Learn from Photographs
Students tend to underestimate the information in pictures. Show a picture to your class and tell them one thing you learned about that animal, simply by "reading the photograph". Keep flipping pages and have your students share what they are learning.
👉Learn from Captions
After looking at photographs, good readers confirm their findings by reading the captions. Model finding information on a photograph, then reading a caption to prove or disprove your findings.
👉Learn from Diagrams
👉Learn from Maps
My students always took some time to warm up to maps. Model how to read a map to make this feature less intimidating to your students. Point out the Map Title and its legends. Model how you put all that information together to learn information from the map. Also, model how long students should "stick with the map" before turning the page and moving on.
👉Learn from Titles
When flipping through your Animal Book pages searching for information, model reading the titles that you encounter and thinking if the information you are looking for could possibly be there.
👉Learn from the Table of Contents
Your students' Animal Book Reports will likely have a Table of Contents, and this is a great opportunity to review how useful this feature can be when a reader is looking for specific information. Think out loud so your students understand your thinking.
👉Learn from the Index
Show students how you can isolate key words from a question and search those words in the index.
👉Learn from the Text
Model careful reading and matching the information you learn with the questions being asked. Then, have your students listen you read out loud and tell you when they hear the answer to a question you are trying to answer.
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👏Read my post about How to Write an Animal Book here.
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👏To purchase editable templates for an Animal Book Report, check the preview below, or click here.
