Nonfiction Text Structures & Features Cumulative Assignment

Last week, we finished our final project for our nonfiction text features and structures study.  Now, we are working on summarizing nonfiction and making inferences from nonfiction.  I’m having to get quite creative in order to keep my kids engaged in all of this nonfiction work!    Here is a look at what I had  my students do as their final assessment, and also to meet some additional Informational Reading Common Core Standards.

If you are looking for more ideas on teaching nonfiction text structures, check out my blog post about the activities we did HERE!

Basically, the students had to create their own mini-magazine about a topic of their choice.  This also hit some of our research and reasoning standards as well as a few writing standards.  I decided to devote several days to this because I think that if students can WRITE each type of text structure with some success, then the odds of them being able to identify it and also understand the purpose behind different text structures is greater.  The students really had to put some thought into what subtopics would be a good fit for each type of text structure, which is exactly what I was hoping for.  This would also be a great at-home project if you don’t have a few days of class time to devote to it.

We began with research and rough drafts using the assignment sheet.  Each student got to pick a semi-broad topic that they could write 5 articles about.  We went to the library, and each student used a print resource, an online resource, and they were challenged to find a media resource, if possible.

We glued.

We made gorgeous covers.

We checked our assignment sheets to make sure we had everything that was required.

Then, we shared our magazines in Scoot fashion.  Everyone left their magazine at their desk, and we took some time scooting from desk to desk to read the magazines.  The kids LOVED reading them!

They brought sticky notes with them so that they could make kind comments on each other’s magazines and also so that they could answer one of the comprehension questions the students had included.