Before break, my students turned in their latest independent book report.  This was a different kind of book report, though.  They have done plenty of non-fiction book reports, so I wanted to shake things up a bit.  I created a Non-Fiction “book” report for the students in which they had to find a newspaper or magazine and pull out text features and respond to several prompts.  Here is the informational text book report instruction sheet as they received it.

The informational text book reports were strongly based off of Common Core Standards, and I had taught all of these different skills before they did the assignment. The students enjoyed this assignment because they got to choose the magazine (they ALL did magazines!) they worked through, so it was very high interest.  It was authentic and meaningful. My students did the assignment at home, but you could easily have them complete this in class as well. Each student turned in their magazine along with their assignments.

Here are some pictures of the finished products.  

Students had several assignments to complete using different articles within their magazine.  This informational text book report required students to select character traits based on a person mentioned in an article.

Several students chose to use Post It flags to label each of the required text features. This definitely made my job easy!

FREE Informational Text Book Report Intructions

You can download this FREE project in two versions. Here is the Editable Document if you want to modify the assignment. Here is the PDF Version, which keeps fonts and formatting in tact.

Expanded Project With Differentiation Options

Looking for a way to differentiation this project? Purchase this cumulative informational text book report kit which includes THREE levels of the printable informational text projects (9-17 pages each), a detailed rubric for each level (this makes assessment easy!), and DIGITAL versions in Google Slides.

More Informational Text Tips

This post on analyzing text features is packed with more informational text teaching tips and activities.