Leever's Lessons: Text Features

During our Egypt unit, we spend the majority of our time on non-fiction Egyptian selections. There are a huge number of books out there that grab kids'attention and really get them interested in the Egyptian culture. I have about 75 of those books, and the kids love sorting through them and comparing what they've read. This post is NOT about one of those texts :)

This post is focusing on one of those other kinds of texts-the kind that kids don't really love to read, but unfortunately does a great job of breaking down the information they need about a particular topic. During today's class, we spent our time working in pairs with a general "Ancient Egypt" article. The article itself was about 6 pages long, but it was interspersed with loads of pictures, graphics, sidebars, charts, and captions. There were also several thought-provoking questions that required activating their schema, making connections to those other texts, and using the information in the article itself.

While working, to make it a little more tactile, I handed out highlighters and mini Post-It notes to each student. They were allowed to use the highlighters to highlight important information, and use one Post-It per page to record one text feature they found. While I use Post-Its almost daily in my room, I almost never use highlighters. For one, they aren't allowed to use them on the state test, so I like them to be familiar with simply underlining. But also, I find that they blatant overuse of highlighting text to be so frustrating! They get so into using colors that they often end up highlighting the entire text...which is worse than highlighting nothing! But, I think that every once in a while it's good, because it gets them out of a rut and lets them have a little fun, especially while reading something that can get a little monotonous.