Strategies to Use With Any Non-Fiction Text

Are you scrambling at the last minute to find a text to read with your students?  Do you find yourself searching readworks.org, newsela.com or scholastic for an article right before a session starts?  Once you find the right article, what do you do next?  Now you’re searching for a random graphic organizer to go along with the text.   Let’s say you find the right article, you find the right graphic organizer, but now you are staring at a group of 5 students with 5 different goals and you don’t know where to start.  Even if your students are working on different goals, you can still read the same text with them and then they can work on different skills based on their speech and language goals.  Wanna know how to do this?  Keep reading.

Here are our favorite activities to use with any non-fiction texts. We put all of the strategies on a one page worksheet. This way, everyone in the group has the same worksheet, but are assigned a different strategy based on their speech and language goals. Here are some strategies included on the one-pager:

KWL CHART

This is a great way for students to organize information before, during, and after reading a text. 

• Know: What do your students already know about this topic? This is super important when it comes to activating prior knowledge.  Many of our students are unfamiliar with topics they come across so it’s important for them to share their background knowledge on a topic before diving in.
• Wonder:  Have your students use those critical thinking skills to question the topic.  What more do they want to know about a topic?  What questions do they have about the topic? 
• Learned: What new information did your students learn?  This can be done during or after the reading.  Have students refer to their ‘WONDER’ questions to see if they can answer them.  Have them write down anything new or interesting they read.

MAKE A CONNECTION

When students make connections to what they are reading, they are better able to understand the information.  Activating prior knowledge and experiences will help them to relate to a text and increase engagement.

• Text-to-Text: How is this text similar to other things you have read?
• Text-to-Self: What does this text remind you of?  
• Text-to-World: What does this remind you of in the real world? 

MAIN IDEA AND DETAILS

The main idea is the author’s message about the topic which is then supported by details throughout the text.  How to find the main idea:

• Identify the topic
• Summarize the text in one sentence
• Read the first and last sentences
• Look for repetition of ideas

OPINION RESPONSE

To improve oral language skills, provide students with accountable talk sentence starters to verbally express their opinion.  

• Affirm: This is important because…
• Agree: I agree with ______ because…
• Disagree: I disagree with ______ because…

Now take it to the next step and have your students use the OREO strategy to write an opinion response.

• Opinion: Give your opinion by telling how you feel about the topic
• Reason: Give some reasons or information to support your opinion
• Evidence: Give an example that supports your reason
• Opinion: Restate your opinion

MAKE AN INFERENCE

An inference is a logical conclusion based on evidence and reasoning.  In simpler terms, teach your students this strategy:

• My Observations: What do I see?
• My Personal Experiences: What do I know?
• My Inference: Conclusions based on observations and experiences

If you’d rather save time on searching for those articles, we got you.  Check out our text breakdown with socially relevant texts.  Our students love the different topics and the best part is they want to keep reading and even stay after the bell rings for their next class.