I spent part of this afternoon prepping for a lesson I am teaching tomorrow. The lesson should help our grade four students take what they know about non-fiction text structures and help them transfer it to reading online. Here is what I have planned.
(5 minutes) First we will use this presentation to make the connection that text features, like facial features or road signs, help us navigate. Then we will review some common text features. (NOTE: The text feature posters in this presentation were created by Beth Newingham. She shared them on the Scholastic.com blog.)
Next, we will use this Text Feature Scavenger Hunt. I created it as a Google spreadsheet so we can all use it at once. (Hopefully we will be blessed with speedy internet. If we aren’t, we will have to work in larger groups or all together at the IWB.)
(5 minutes) I will model how I scan a webpage to inventory it. On the scavenger hunt I put a 1 in the column of each text feature that I find. As the students work, the totals for each feature will appear at the top of the page.
(10-15 minutes) Students will work in pairs to inventory the text features on their assigned web page. I am pairing them by computer number since this is a quick activity and reading level should not be a problem. I want them seated near each other so they can discuss which features are and are not on the page. I am hoping that by pairing them they will locate more features per page and that the discussion they have will help them learn. (I used the reading level feature in Google’s advanced search to find pages that should be of an appropriate reading level.)
If they finish quickly, they can scroll down and inventory another web page. If all the sites are taken they can visit sites already evaluated to see if the first pair missed any features.
(5 minutes) When all the pages have been inventoried, we will come back together as a class to discuss what we discovered. After our discussion, I will model how to complete one of the red cells near the bottom of the spreadsheet. That space is for explaining how that text feature helped me navigate the page and understand what I was reading.
If time permits, our final activity will be for students to add a post to their blogs regarding what they learned. They can use the red rows on the spreadsheet to help them get started.
In the next lesson, I might use a form similar to this one. I’d want to find really high interests sites since the activity itself won’t enthrall them.
A few words about the websites:
- You could improve this lesson by drawing pages from a greater variety of websites. I drew quite a few pages from the same site because it was pulling in quite a few different text features.
- I avoided pages with almost no text features. However, if time permits I may pull some up to show that they are more difficult to read.