The Life and Work of Dr. Seuss: A Nonfiction Text Structure Activity

Over the last few weeks, the students in our language arts intervention groups have been working on nonfiction text structure.  We have been working hard on increasing the complexity of text that we present to the students.  Initially, we started with simpler activities with a strong emphasis on visual supports and identifying clue words.  Our February 20th post, Non Fiction Text Structure, was a great example of this.  Next, we moved to task cards.  These cards included clue/signal words with a range of reading lexiles due to the tier 3 vocabulary.  The students were intimated by the lengthier passages, but they did fantastic!  (The passages were also used with our intervention group that was working on decoding multisyllabic words, another reason for the higher reading lexiles.)  They gained a lot of confidence reading the passages and discovered that their length had nothing to do with the actual content...and they rocked the content!  (If you're looking for this set of task cards, they are available here at our TPT store.)

Today, they were given another challenge.  I presented them with a full page of text, again, at a higher reading lexile for those students working on decoding.  They were excited to find that the text was about the life and work of Dr. Seuss.  Unintimidated, they started reading with confidence and excitement. After each paragraph, they were asked to determine what type of text structure was present and then provide evidence from the text to support their answer.  While I tried to be very pointed about the type of structure I embedded within each paragraph when wrote it, they were able to provide several great discussion points about the type of text structure they thought the paragraphs represented and why.  It was a much better activity than I anticipated! If you want to check it out, you can also find it at our TPT store.  It's free until this Wednesday at noon, so grab yours now!