Text Features vs. Text Structures

In fifth grade, we move past identifying text features in nonfiction, to looking at text structures -- the way the author has organized the information in the book.

For a refresher course on text features, my go-to book is:

Bloody Horned Lizards

This book has a table of contents, headings, text boxes, pictures and captions, key words in bold, an index, and a glossary. (As a bonus extra, it has a narrative lead, in case you collect nonfiction books with a variety of leads!)

Here is my stack of mentor texts for text structures:

A Chicken Followed Me Home!

Question/Answer structure

Colors of the Wind

Narrative structure

How To Swallow a Pig

How-To structure

A Friend for Lakota

Sequential structure

Lillian's Right to Vote

Organized around the metaphor of a mountain

Tree of Wonder

Organized numerically (bonus -- gorgeously written descriptive lead)

The Most Amazing Creature in the Sea 

Compare/Contrast structure

Living Color

Organized by colors

Snakes 

Main Idea/Detail structure

Trout are Made of Trees

Sequential structure (tells the end first, then goes back and tells the steps)

A Place For Turtles

Cause/Effect structure

W is for Wind

ABC structure

Cowboy Up!

Poem + Information structure

Reading a Poetry Book With Nonfiction Eyes

The Poem that Will Not End
by Joan Bransfield Graham
illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker
Two Lions, 2014

Like many new nonfiction picture books, this book has lots going on on every page. There is the main text -- the poem-story of how Ryan O'Brian's brain is taken over by rhythm and rhyme -- accompanied by the poems Ryan O'Brian writes as he goes through his day. There are detailed and entertaining illustrations that elaborate on Ryan O'Brian's adventures. At the end of the book, there is more information about the different forms (19 in all!) and the different voices (narrative, lyrical, mask, apostrophe, conversational) he uses in his poems.

So, in the same way that a multi-text nonfiction book can be read and re-read for many purposes, this is a book that readers can return to again and again. It will be interesting to share this book next to a nonfiction book in a minilesson in reading workshop on text structures. In writing workshop, I can share it as a resource for examples of poetry forms and voices. On Poetry Friday, we can be entertained by the main story, or any one of Ryan's poems.

Lots of possibilities here!


Last January, the book launch blog tour began with Sylvia at Poetry For Children. Check the links at the bottom of her post for other blogs on the tour.