Celebrate Nonfiction

Exploring the Joy of Nonfiction Reading and Writing

Writing Informational Texts in K-2

Recently,
a lot of early elementary teachers have been asking me for writing ideas for
their students. Since a major goal for K-2  is
learning to recognize text features, I wanted to share a great project developed
by Mrs. Teany (@room12owls), a fabulous K teacher at Memorial School
(@MemLibrary) in Medfield, MA.

First,
Mrs. Teany’s students read a wide variety of age-appropriate books written by
me and published by Enslow/Rosen, National Geographic, and Harper Collins. Then
they created their own text features, using the ones in my books as mentor texts.

Here
are some samples. I think you’ll agree that the results are fantastic.

A
caption and labels highlighting a butterfly’s body parts.

Labels
on a gripping drawing of a hurricane.

 

A
“zoom bubble” showing a close-up view of a dragonfly’s head next to a complete
body image with very colorful wings.

Comparing
a frog and toad, highlighting that frogs have teeth but toads don’t. (top) Fact boxes with information about two frogs, one is poisonous and one isn’t. (bottom)

I’m
so happy to see that students are using these books as mentor texts as they learn
and have fun. Thanks for your great ideas, Mrs. Teany!


Update: Memorial School’s fabulous librarian Randie Groden created this fun video of the whole class’s text feature posters. Take a look.

2 Responses

  1. Thanks for the shout out Melissa. We had the best time reading your books (and we have a ton in our school library)! Your work inspired us to be non fiction writers and we were so thrilled to meet you in person.

  2. I was blown away by the students' fantastic text feature posters and knew I had to share them with other educators. I hope your project will inspire teachers across America.

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