Comprehending Informational Text – Part One

“Children are more likely to learn and remember the information when they can create mental files, storing and organizing the information inside larger categories.” Jennifer Serravallo

          Jennifer Serravallo, the author of The Reading Strategies Book, begins her discussion on informational text by saying that children, when asked to talk about a book, will say back wow-worthy facts like “did you know that the hippo population in the Congo decreased from 22,000 to 400 in less than twenty years?!” When asked to say more, many students can’t.  She continues, “the thing is, as cool as it is to know some stand-out facts, children are more likely to learn and remember the information when they can create mental files, storing and organizing the information inside larger categories.”

Learning how to understand what a text is about is critical to comprehension.

         

Labels Teach

          Text features are a large part of reading, navigating, and understanding nonfiction. They help support the main information in the text, add to it, and/or help us navigate it. The types of features are limitless.  Researchers have found that teaching text features in isolation may not be effective. We need to shift our thinking and instruction needs to be more than identifying the feature. We need to help students use these features to get more information from a text.  At primary reading levels, photographs and illustrations provide more facts and details than the text itself. With that in mind, we are going to discuss a strategy called Labels Teach. In this strategy, students are focused on labels and the information they provide.

          Possible steps for Labels Teach are:

·        Read the text.

·        Look at the picture.

·        See what the label is labeling.

·        Think about how the picture, text, and label all fit together.

A possible sentence stem that you may choose to use might be: In the book _____, the author uses a lot of labels.  On the pages with the heading _____, we learned about _____.

          Prompts may be useful to check for understanding.  These could be used with a turn and talk procedure to engage all students. It will take lots of modeling and practice before students will internalize these strategies, so using prompts with them will guide them through the process.  Some prompts may include:  

·        Where do you see a label?

·        Tell me how the facts you learned and the label connect.

·        How does the label help you?

·        Now that you read the label and saw the picture, go back and read the rest of the page.  How does it connect?

          It might be beneficial to work with EL students and/or students working on grade level with support in a small group before or after a whole group lesson or demonstration.  Meeting with them prior to the lesson will give them an edge on understanding what you’re demonstrating; meeting after the lesson will give them a chance to discuss and process more thoroughly.  This could be done during your small group instruction time. 

          You may want to provide graphic organizers to help students discuss and record information as they read.  Also, focus on text features such as bold words, pictures, and graphs that can clue the students in to how the text is organized.