Text Features & Informational Text

We have been working on reading informational text. Many of my 3rd graders have not been exposed to a great deal of non fiction. Book boxes in my class must have at least one non fiction book in them at all times. We spent about a week studying text features and the kids had a ball using post its and working with a buddy! As a culmination to this study, I gave students just a piece of text about Abraham Lincoln (my favorite president) and had them create a booklet adding text features they thought were needed to help the reader better understand it. Most added a map of Kentucky, one added a timeline, others added fact boxes. They highlighted important words and wrote captions to pictures they drew. They made title pages, too. The partners had to share their work and tell the class why the features they added would help someone understand the text better. We continue to practice finding text features while reading Scholastic News. The kids use post its and have to list 3 text features and use one post it to tell me how that feature helped them understand the text. I really feel they have a good understanding of how text features help them and I think they are more in tune to looking and reading them in non fiction.