Questions to ask of chronological order text

 

  I usually teach chronological order text fairly early in our study of text structures. Students can draw on their understandings of narratives and their own experiences with time order to quickly build an understanding of this text structure.
    But this doesn't mean that chronological order text is simple. In fact, these texts often have deep complexities lurking beneath the surface.

How does the author play with time?
    Comparing a timeline to a chronological order text is fascinating. While timelines have a regular, ordered interval between events, chronological order texts often zoom in on certain time periods while flitting over others. An event that is important to the sequence may have several sentences devoted to it, while a less important event may be glossed over in just one or two sentences.
    With a group of fourth graders, we looked at the use of time in "Lafayette and the Battle for Freedom." Lafayette's early years are discussed very quickly in the first paragraph. The rate slows down in the second section, however. Why? How does this match with the main idea of the article as a whole?
    Noticing these differences in fourth and fifth grades can help students to have more sophisticated discussions in upper grades. How does this use of time reveal an author's bias? Why might an author want to devote more space to a particular event?
 

How is this different from a narrative?
    As you can see in the last post, my students really love reading about animals. Because we're doing a choice-based activity right now (Expedition Text Structure), they are happy to select animal text structure books for themselves. I've started to devote more read-aloud time to technology and history texts.
   We were reading Steam, Smoke, and Steel: Back in Time with Trains when a student said, "Wait. How is this different from a story?"
    This is a great question! It's best to send it right back to the students: "What do you think? What does a story have that this text does not?" Some texts have blurrier edges than others. These can provoke wonderful discussions. (Bad News for Outlaws comes to mind as a great example of this.)

How do the paragraphs line up with events?
   This question can lead to great discussions as students are reading. Many students will think that authors will use one paragraph for each event in a narrative. But this isn't always the case! Check out this text from my Introduction to Text Structure unit. Which paragraphs have only one event? Which have more than one? Why might this be so?

Peregrine Falcon Chronological Order from Emily Kissner

    As you can see, chronological order text can be fascinating to explore and discuss!

Other posts about text structure
-Peregrine Falcons, Chronological Order, and More! (from 2013)
-Assessing Text Structure (from 2012)
-Chronological Order Texts (from 2011)
-Comparing Texts: Chronological Order (from 2011)
-The Many Sides of Chronological Order Text (from 2011)
-Text Structure: Chronological Order (from 2010)
-Teaching Text Structure (from 2009)

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Summarizing Chronological Order Text

Looking for classroom-ready chronological order texts with graphic organizers, multiple choice questions, and teaching plans? Check out this resource:  Chronological Order Texts for Teaching Text Structure   

I love teaching text structure because I love exploring all of the different ways that authors can play around with expressing ideas. (See my Pinterest board for some texts.)
    Today I shared a wood frogs text with a group of readers. I had selected texts for the class based on a quick interest survey designed by one of my fabulous colleagues. A student agreed to tabulate the results (for 10 coupons, our classroom currency) with these unsurprising results.
  I love the other ideas listed at the bottom. I will have to start working on some texts about gems, koalas, and technology! (Or maybe koalas who create technology with gems...hmm...)

From text to graphic organizer
    In the small group, we started by looking at the text, especially the headings. "The headings don't really help you know the topics," one student mused.
   I modeled a strategy for note-taking with chronological order text by underlining and numbering events in the text. We went section by section through the text, discussing which paragraphs introduced new events and which gave additional information about events. (Notice that a student convinced me to add an event. Awesome!)
  A quick note about this: Looking for these events is a fuzzy process. There may be multiple ways of considering what are separate events and what can be lumped together. After all, I wrote the wood frog text and a student convinced me to change my mind about an event.
    Don't turn away from this fuzziness. If you're not sure about something, tell the students. "Would this be one event, or two? What do you think?"
    After we had our events underlined, making the graphic organizer was easy. I modeled the process of writing first and then putting boxes around the text. We also talked about how to change the wording and condense ideas.
    Notice that this is not beautiful, but quickly sketched and displayed with the help of the document camera.

From graphic organizer to summary
    I love scaffolded summaries. If I were ever to be able to write another edition of the summarizing book, I would add a whole chapter about scaffolded summaries! These frames help students to see what the summary should look like while still giving them some work to do.
    Fourth grade readers are always asking, "How long should this be?" when asked to write a summary! So I introduced the scaffolded summary by asking students to count the sentences. How does this relate to the original text?
    Then, we went between the scaffolded summary and the graphic organizer. We explored which events were put together in the summary, and why. Then we filled in the blanks and read the entire thing. Some blanks could have multiple answers, while others required just one.
    A scaffolded summary is a good first step for summarizing chronological order text. Often, kids love the details of the text so much that they just can't discard any, and their summaries go on and on and on. Explicit teaching about how to combine events (also known as "collapsing lists") helps them to confront this tendency and try to avoid it.
    Our next step is for students to write the graphic organizer and summary independently. To give them some choice, I've set up a box with a wide variety of chronological order texts. They can browse the box and select the texts that interest them.

Notes
-The wood frog text used above is available in Chronological Order Texts. Wood frog eggs are in vernal pools now and are great for the classroom!



 

Understanding Text Structure

Back in 2008, as I was doing presentations about summarizing, I was surprised that teachers wanted more about text structures--more examples, more resources, more teaching tools.

I created a PowerPoint to share some short paragraphs. This PowerPoint has been around for what seems like an eternity online, with 85,000 downloads on TpT and just about as many views on Slideshare. (I did take it down from Slideshare over the summer when I found it reposted all over the place, so it's starting fresh with the views.)

When I looked through it again a few months ago I thought...well, it was definitely due for an update. So I have refreshed it with new photos and some new paragraphs while still keeping many of the examples and review slides. Here it is:

Understanding text structures from Emily Kissner

You'll notice that I finally gave in with the text structure of "Description". Originally, I had called this "Statement and Support" or "Main Idea". However, the term description has come into more frequent use, and I decided to go with it. (I guess I really gave in to this two summers ago when I created the sets of Description texts.)

I put this back on Slideshare because I think it would be a great resource for a flipped classroom, or to embed on a classroom website. Do let me know if you are planning to use it in an interesting or exciting way!

News
-November homework will be coming soon!
-I used the story "Pumpkin Seeds" from the October Reading Homework this week. We had a great time acting out the story and finding the theme.
-I've updated the author links on my classroom blog ...kids said they had the best reading class ever when they visited the Jack Stalwart site, the Babymouse site, and the Skeleton Creek site! You'll find the author links over on the right side, under the popular posts. Tweet

Peregrine Falcons, Chronological Order, and More!

Over the last two weeks, we've been looking at chronological order text. I like to start with this text structure for several reasons:

-Chronological order text is similar to narrative structure.

-Chronological order matches what students experience in their lives.

-Chronological order is easy to understand and analyze.

This year, I went carefully through my collection of texts to try to find the texts that my students would find the most interesting and engaging. One of my favorite kinds of chronological order text is the animal life cycle text. Last fall, I wrote a new set of texts that includes a text about how peregrine falcons raise their young. This text was a good starting point for students, as it follows a fairly short span of time. (And peregrine falcons are awesome!) 

After reading the text, we went online to check out the peregrine falcon cams. Our local peregrine, up the road in Harrisburg, was at the nest when we checked. And she laid her first egg between Tuesday and Wednesday! This was so amazing. Kids started going back to the text to see when the eggs might hatch.

Harrisburg Falcon Cam

After we worked through the animal life cycle texts, I wanted students to experience a procedural text. Procedural texts exist in kind of hypothetical time. They do not explore events that have actually happened, but look at steps in a process. We talked about the organization of procedural texts as I displayed a few examples of recipes and crafts projects. Then, students read the "Fabric Scrap Easter Eggs" text from Chronological Order Texts. 

Reading procedural texts with the goal of answering questions is much different from reading procedural texts with the goal of completing the task. Today's tests, of course, value answering questions over performing tasks. (Anyone else remember the MSPAP tests of the 90s? Kids actually had to perform the tasks on those tests...which probably led to its own set of challenges.) 

I love the Easter eggs text because it is about the way that we always dyed eggs when I was little. My students had little patience for the process. When they got to Step 5, some of them were downright annoyed. "You mean you could go through all of those steps, get all that fabric and cut it up, and then have it not even work? Why would anyone want to do this?" Ah well, these are the questions that we ask of procedural text.

I was tempted to give the assessment at this point. I am trying to be more efficient this year, and compact topics into more manageable chunks. But I just couldn't do it. I wanted students to have some experience with a chronological order text about a historical event. 

To make the task a little more interesting, I didn't give students the texts right away. Instead, they had some pictures and a map. "What will this text be about?" I asked them. "What clues do you have?" They pieced together the evidence and tried to make some guesses. There was a building on fire,horses pulling an old-fashioned fire truck, and an untitled map of a city along Lake Michigan. The map did have some labels of locations.

"This is a fire truck, because I've seen it in a museum," one girl told her partner. In another group, a student found the 10-point font "Chicago Railroad" on the map and said, "I bet this is about Chicago." Another student looked up at my Student Learning Map, which I had posted two weeks before, and said, "Look, that text says 'Great Chicago Fire' and we have some pictures of buildings on fire. So I bet that's the text that we're going to read." (Honestly, I'd forgotten that I'd put it up there!)

This fifteen-minute activity helped to get the students much more engaged in the text, which they read with their partners. Our next step will be to use the figures to act out the action and to create our own graphic organizers. Will students be able to merge content and structure to make a creative organizer? I hope so.

Every year I wonder if I should come up with one theme to unite all of my text structure readings...and every year I enjoy putting together a patchwork of different texts. In the weeks to come, as we look at other structures, we'll revisit the peregrine falcon and the Great Chicago Fire, as well as look at some other topics. 

Chronological Order Texts for Teaching Text Structure

One of the hardest parts of teaching nonfiction is the constant scrounging for text. Finding text with the right level, the right topic, the right text features--it takes time and effort.

For the past few years, I've been working on creating sets of texts for teachers to use. I do have a set of "Text Structure Resources" that I send to teachers at their request. Over the summer, I posted Cause and Effect Texts and Activities, followed by Compare and Contrast and Problem and Solution. All of these files include multiple texts that show the text structure, along with activities and teaching tips. The goal is to minimize the effort of scrounging for text.

But why no chronological order? Even though this is the text structure that I usually start with for teaching text structure, it's taken me time to put together resources for it. Part of the reason is that chronological order can take so many different forms. Procedural text, animal life cycle texts, biographies, historical accounts--all of them are organized in chronological order. If I was to put together a set of chronological texts, I'd have to include examples of all of these.

This was a daunting task! This fall, I started to write. And write. And write. I started out with "Whoopie Wars". When I began the research, I firmly believed that the whoopie pie was a Pennsylvania Dutch treat. I even looked in the old Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks myself (what a wealth of knowledge is available from Google Books!), hoping to find something that others had missed. Alas, no documentation for whoopie pies in Pennsylvania--but a good story. I needed to do some firsthand research so that I could take photos of whoopie pies, so my husband and I spent a Saturday baking whoopie pies with our sons. Research has never been so delicious.

I knew that I would write about monarch butterflies and wood frogs, because I had great photos of both creatures over their lifespans. These articles were easy to write. I look forward to sharing the wood frog article with my students this March, when we bring in some wood frog tadpoles into the classroom.

The biographies, however, proved a little harder. I had originally written "Anthony Wayne" when I was doing an in-service presentation for teachers in Waynesboro.  I decided to do some deeper research and spent a few weekends reading letters to and from Anthony Wayne. This gave me the confidence I needed to write "Dolley Madison", which was considerably more difficult--especially because many of Dolley's documented recollections from later in her life were found to be questionable. Writing this short piece took hours of research from multiple sources to make sure that I was including only the best information. I couldn't get the readability on Dolley Madison low enough, so I went ahead and finished out the set with "Lafayette", a text which my husband already plans to use with his third graders.

The finished product, "Chronological Order Texts for Teaching Text Structure" includes 10 texts, 8 with before, during, and after reading activities and multiple choice questions. It costs three dollars, and hopefully will save you from hours of scrounging for texts. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Comparing Texts: Chronological Order

Today we finished our Chronological Order centers. Hooray! Interestingly, the kids liked the historical text (The Great Chicago Fire, from Toolkit Texts), the animal life cycle texts, and the procedural text. The biography--well, not so much. I'm still thinking about why this genre is such a stretch for kids.

Our last step was comparing two chronological order texts. Students worked with a partner to complete a chart with criteria such as topic, text structure, transition words used, and text features. Students could choose which texts they compared, and the classroom was filled with the quiet noise of engaged talk. "Why doesn't this one have any transition words?" one girl asked, pointing to the procedural text. "Good question," I replied. "Why do you think they're missing?" Working with her partner, the girl was able to recognize that a set of directions, organized in steps, doesn't need the same kind of linking words as a text written in paragraphs. Wow!

I had two reasons for moving into this activity. Our fifth grade teachers have commented that students have trouble comparing texts across topics. By looking at two texts with the same structure, I could help them to see one important criteria for comparison.

My other reason for having students compare two chronological order texts was as a kind of pre-assessment. By watching students work in pairs to complete the comparison chart and turn it into a paragraph, I could easily see what they knew about comparing and contrasting. Could they use any transition words? Could they craft a topic sentence? When I teach about compare and contrast text structure next week, we'll have a shared experience on which to build our learning. Hopefully, students will be able to remember the problems that they grappled with as they wrote compare and contrast text, and then examine how authors solve those problems.

The Many Sides of Chronological Order Text

Well! I'm hoping for a full week this week, because we're working on chronological order text structure. Snow, stay away!

Last year, I wrote about questions to ask of chronological order text. This year, I'm going one step further to look at the different sides of chronological order text. More so than any other text structure, chronological order comes in great variety. This makes it important to help students see all of the different permutations of chronological order nonfiction so that they can use this structure effectively.

Here are some of the texts that we'll be looking at:

How-to/Procedural: This kind of chronological order exists in an almost hypothetical time. Instead of telling about an event that has already happened, how-to texts look to the future to events that can happen. A great way to help students see different kinds of how-to texts is to look at directions for paper snowflakes. How are the different sets of directions similar? How are they different? Why is it important that directions are written in chronological order? What text features does the author use?

Biography: Biography fits into an interesting category, straddling expository and narrative text. But these are great to use to look at chronological order. Often, biographies will start with an event from the middle or end of a person's life, and then go back and tell the story in order. Look at how biographies link events and show the passage of time. It's interesting to get several biographies of the same person and look at how the authors played around with time in each one. How does the author show the passage of time? What parts does the author skip? How does the author show the chain of events? Is there a timeline that puts it all together?

Animal Life Cycle: This sub-genre of informational text is popular with kids! These texts show how an animal grows and develops. Often, they include the familiar cycle diagram that shows how one life stage leads to another. John Himmelman writes many lovely books that show the life cycles of different animals. Others can be found in Toolkit Texts or on the shelves of the library. How does the author connect the events? Is there a diagram that summarizes the life cycle? How are these texts similar to other chronological order texts?

Historical Events: These texts can tell about an event over time, or show how something has developed and changed over the years. These are often more difficult for students, and are a kind of text that they are less likely to pick up and read on their own. But understanding how chronological order is shown in these texts is essential for students who need to understand content area texts. Why are these texts written in chronological order? What is the time span of the event?

To help my students understand these different kinds of texts, I've made a set of centers that show the different kinds of chronological order texts. We'll see how it works--if the storm stays away!

Chronological order centers

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