Fiction, Nonfiction, Expository, Narrative...

Okay, I have to admit it. I hate it when people refer to every text as a "story".

I understand that it's second nature. After all, when I was growing up, our reading class was organized around the basal reader. Every week we read the next story. So I was conditioned to call any piece of text longer than a paragraph a "story".

But not every text is a story. In the past few years, I've tried to be more careful when talking about text with kids. The word "story" does slip out now and again, and I correct myself. It's important to me that kids associate the word "story" with the parts of a story grammar. Using this word to describe an article would send the total wrong message.

Part of the problem, of course, is the question of what else to call these texts. If you look at the literature, you'll see that there are many different ways to refer to texts, just adding to the confusion. Here's a quick rundown.

Fiction/Nonfiction: A Question of Content
The difference between fiction and nonfiction is easy. Fiction texts are not strictly true (while they may contain true events or real people), while nonfiction texts are based on facts. These distinctions are based on what is in the text. Sometimes, a reader has to read very carefully to figure out if something is fiction or nonfiction.

Expository/Narrative: A Matter of Organization
The differences between expository and narrative text are not as well-known (even to other teachers, I've discovered.) Narrative texts tell a story. It's easy to find a beginning, middle, and an end. Usually, narrative texts have characters, settings, conflicts, and a theme.

Expository texts, on the other hand, are structured to explain information. Instead of using the narrative structure, authors of expository text use a host of other text structures. (Lots more on expository text structures here and here and here!)

The tricky part
In the classroom, it's sometimes easy to use "nonfiction" as a shorthand for "expository". It's true--most expository text is nonfiction, and most nonfiction text is expository. But biographical and autobiographical writing is a notable exception. A personal narrative, for example, is a true account of a story from someone's life--a nonfiction narrative.

At the same time, I've seen more and more expository fiction lately. Many students like to read encyclopedic style guides to comic book characters. These guides follow an expository structure, but convey fictional information.

This points to teaching students the words expository and narrative, of course. Some teachers don't like to do this because it adds to the overall vocabulary load of students, and I can understand their point.  I think that fourth graders can easily handle it. Teachers in younger grades, I'd love to hear your thinking on when these terms can make their way into the language of the classroom.

So what do we call it?
Instead of using the word "story", what should we call texts? Well, I usually fall back on the word "text". (Make sure that you teach this word early in the year. If you work with ELL students, show them the difference between "text" and "test".) I also throw in the words selection and passage, as these are likely to show up on standardized tests.

And, of course, there is much to be said for sending the question back to the students. What should we call this piece of text that we're looking at? What does it remind you of? How is it similar to other texts you've read? Even if they do not know the strictly correct terms, they can often give texts names that will help them to make connections across genres.

"Can I have that book that tells you what different things are?" one kid asked when he wanted a field guide. "You know, it has pictures, and tells you names." Another student, when browsing through picture books, noticed that some had people on every page, while others didn't. Were these fiction/nonfiction? Narrative/expository? It would be interesting to find out.

As I unpack my classroom this August after another classroom move, I know that I'm going to leave my classroom library slightly disorganized. Looking at these kinds of text in the first week of school--and talking about how we can put them in categories--will be a great way to start the year.

Understanding Procedural Text

Procedural text looks so easy, doesn't it? Short sentences, nice numbered steps...it seems like it shouldn't pose any comprehension problems.

But as anyone who has ever tried to follow directions written by a state department of education knows, easy looks can be deceiving. And helping students to understand procedural text isn't always easy, either.

What do we know about procedural text? Reading to perform a task often results in more developed comprehension than reading with the goal of answering questions or writing a summary (Geiger and Millis, 2004).  This isn't surprising to those who have tried to commit a set of directions to memory--when you know that you'll have to follow directions, you're much more likely to put forth the mental effort to visualize and understand each step. However, think about how this impacts students when they read on standardized tests. They know that they won't be following these directions...and reading procedural text without the goal of making or doing is really dull.

For the classroom, this means that we need to give students opportunities to read and follow directions in procedural texts. Once students have strong representations of what a reader needs to understand to follow directions, then we can slide this understanding over to reading for inauthentic purposes. Here are some things that I keep in mind to help students work with procedural texts.

Write directions for classroom activities
This is an easy classroom management tool. When I explain directions, I write them on the whiteboard or a chart. Then, as I circulate around the room, I ask students which step they are on. (This is effective for dealing with misbehavior too--"Which step are you on? Hm, you don't know? What needs to change right now?")

At first, I always used numbered lists. But now I vary the styles to mirror what kids are likely to see in other contexts. Sometimes I use bullets, and sometimes I even write the directions as a narrative. (First, you will....Then, remember to...)  Kids do critique me on my steps, and sometimes suggest that I add or change things. ("You forgot to put in where we have to find our partners") I love it when this happens!

Try out different kinds of procedural texts
One of my favorite winter activities is gathering various directions for making paper snowflakes, and then reading and trying to follow them. It's so interesting to look at how different authors have dealt with explaining a set of difficult directions. Other interesting directions to look at include making ice cream in a zip-top bag, making book covers, and sprouting avocado pits.

Share with students the procedural texts that you use every day
Students like to see behind the curtain of teaching. When I teach new games from directions or try out something new, I show students the procedural texts that I am using and talk through my frustrations. (This was especially fun when I was learning to use my new Promethean board!) Even something as simple as the directions for how to line up for class photos can be a teaching tool. And, when I've shared the directions with the students, I'm more likely to remember them myself.

Don't fall into the "explaining" trap
I once had a principal who said, "I never want to walk into a classroom and see a teacher reading directions to students." His point was simple--the kids can read the directions. We need to give them the chance. When students are reading procedural texts, it's hard for me to keep from stepping in and giving them hints and helps. But they need to be able to do this on their own. When they ask for help, I try to send questions back their way:

-What have you tried already?
-Can you find the specific word that you don't understand?
-Which step is a problem for you?
-What comes before ___?
-What do you think you should do next?

I've realized that I am more likely to become an explainer if I'm worried about materials. If I have enough materials for kids to start over if they mess up, then I can be comfortable with letting them feel their way through the directions.

Learn from mistakes
I could write down all of the times that I have failed at following procedural text...but I don't think there is enough room. We've all made mistakes, whether it's not looking at the list of directions, skipping steps, forgetting ingredients, or misinterpreting a step. I have learned so much from my mistakes with procedural texts! In the classroom, I can sometimes feel frustrated when students haven't followed directions. But I've learned to push back that frustration (not always easy!). Epic and funny mistakes become part of our classroom lore. When a student making ice cream accidentally added the salt to the milk, this became a class cautionary tale, a story that the student enjoyed telling.

Visualize following directions
Once we all have lots of experience with following procedural text to perform a task, it's time to look at some isolated texts. I pair this with the reading strategy of visualizing. Even though we won't be making or doing what is explained in the text, I tell students that they can picture themselves following the directions. This helps to keep them grounded in the text and reading each step. We also try to find the most difficult step, the easiest step, and how to mess things up. (This keeps it fun!)

Problem and Solution Text Structure

One of the problems with teaching text structure is finding the right texts. As I think about what books or articles to use with my students, I'm always thinking about levels, topics, and structure.  Which do I consider first? What's most important?

When I'm teaching text structure, of course, the structure is most important. For problem and solution, I like to use texts that are very explicit, using the words "problem" and "solution", as well as texts that are more subtle. Real world problem and solution texts often do not use these clear transition words, and I like to show students how this works.

Once I have the structure,  I have topic and level to worry about. I work in a pretty broad range of levels. After all, background knowledge has a huge impact on expository text comprehension. If I can give my readers rich background knowledge and strong pre-reading activities, they have a better chance of being able to understand the texts that I find. I like to use a pretty comfortable and easy text for whole-group reading, and then some more challenging texts for small groups.

What about topic? I hate it when we are all reading about different topics in guided reading. This just feels so fragmented! But sometimes it just can't be helped--after all, I don't have a staff of writers on demand. (Wouldn't that be wonderful?)  To help us make connections throughout the year, I try to find texts with topics that relate to science or social studies units for our grade level.

Here is a collection of texts for teaching problem and solution text structure. The cost is $3.00, and it includes 7 different texts. Five texts have before, during, and after activities, with a range of reading levels from 3-6. (Do take these reading levels with a grain of salt. When I write texts, I run them through multiple readability formulas, and then correlate those results with what I see from my students and comments from other teachers. The readability formulas vary widely, often across 2 grade levels!)

A mayfly nymph

Some of the texts may look familiar to those of you who have my former pack of Text Structure Resources--the James River Ferry, Rain Gardens, and Salamander Crossing. But each has new activities and graphic organizers to accompany them.

My very favorite text is about stream study with the biotic index--it was interesting to write about how the biotic index really does solve a scientific problem. And I got to use the cool mayfly picture that I took during stream study last week!

Looking for other books? Here are some links to problem-solution texts:

When the Wolves Returned

A Place for Butterflies

Text Structure Picture Books

Teaching Visualizing

I love to teach visualizing. After all, there is a whole chapter about it in my book The Forest AND the Trees! It doesn't really work to tell nine-year-olds, "You need to read at the level of your situation model." But when I tell them, "Let's try to use the details to make a picture in our minds," something clicks. They understand how to make mental models. This gets them to that deeper level of reading that's so hard to describe for young readers.

But not all readers visualize in the same way. This makes teaching visualizing even more fascinating--when we talk about what we visualize, we realize how dependent we are on our background knowledge and experiences. As a teacher, I have come to a new appreciation of how the texts and stories I share become situated in students' schemas. Consider what happened last week when I asked a student to visualize "a green tractor in a birthday hat."

"I thought of the book we read yesterday," the student said. "The one with the robin."

This threw me for a loop. How would a book about a robin relate to a mental image of "a green tractor in a birthday hat"? But then the student reached behind me to get the book I Am Going! by Mo Willems. He turned to the page that had Elephant wearing a funny hat--a hat that happened to have a picture of the ubiquitous Pigeon from Don't Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus.

"See?" he said. "I pictured the tractor wearing a hat like that. It was funny."

This is the power of talking about visualizing--this student was able to trace how he used a mental image from a previous book to create a new mental image. This is also the power of sharing great books and background experiences with children on a regular basis! The experiences we share today will become the visualizations of tomorrow.

Here are some resources for teaching visualizing:
Visualizing Activities and Powerpoint
 Available from TeachersPayTeachers ($3, because it took me so long to write the three stories that are included!)

Visualizing blog post (6/25/11)

Differentiated Spelling: Revised!

Back in 2008, I posted a differentiated spelling program that I had created for my sixth grade class. I've revised some parts and added the missing "Assignment #2" for each list. Here's the link to the revised program:

Differentiated Spelling Program

It turned out to be over 75 pages long--enough to get anyone started with spelling for the 2011-2012 school year. Enjoy!

Retelling to Summarizing

Over the past few weeks, I've been working with some students on how to retell a text. What fun! But it's also given me the chance to think about how retelling is such an important foundation skill for summarizing. Here are some questions that I've been thinking about--and some of my partial answers.

Do readers need to be able to retell in order to write a good summary?

In general, I think that the answer is yes. Consider a student who reads a text and can't produce any ideas from the reading--or only a few scattered ideas, named out of order. Will that child be able to write a good summary? I doubt it. In order to select the most important ideas, a reader needs to be able to envision and work with most of the ideas from the text. Readers who have trouble recalling any ideas at all will flounder with the selection and synthesis that a summary requires.

This doesn't mean that kids who are struggling with retelling shouldn't be exposed to summarizing. In fourth grade, we don't have a moment to spare! But these readers will struggle with writing summaries on their own. Left to their own devices, they might fall into bad habits, like just copying sections of the text.

Instead, pull them into activities like choosing the best summary. Readers of all abilities can learn how to think about what makes a good summary. You could also try writing a group summary. Students provide the ideas or events, and you show them how to put them together into a summary. Another strategy that works well with struggling readers is sequencing events or information from the text. You give them the ideas (remember, this is the part that they struggle with), and they put the ideas in the order in which they appear in the text.

Are there any exceptions?
There are always exceptions, aren't there? That's what makes teaching reading so fun!

There is a small group of readers who will already be summarizing when you ask them to do a retelling. If you were to go by a retelling score alone (on the QRI or DRA), these readers might look like they are struggling. But the content of their retelling is markedly different from that of a struggling reader. When asked to retell, these readers may produce succinct versions of the text that put together ideas from various places into one nice neat package. Their "retellings" show an awareness of the main ideas of the text. (For example, if a student is retelling an episodic story, the student may collapse all of the episodes into one sentence.)

This is why scores and numbers don't tell the whole story. For these students, long and drawn out retellings are probably not necessary. They have already picked up the basics of summarizing by intuition. They would benefit from finding the best summary, sorting ideas as important or not important, and jumping into writing summaries.

Haven't I written about this before?
Um--yes. Quite a lot, as it happens. But with each new reader and new situation I find that I need to relearn and revisit what I already know. :)

Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling (my book)

Previous posts
Retelling or Summarizing?
Summarizing a Story
Summarizing Fiction with Elephant and Piggie
What Should a Good Retelling Include?

Help for Word Callers: Changing Visual Images

Have you ever tried to open a can with a can opener, only to find that the cutting mechanism hasn't engaged? You can turn and turn the crank--but that can will never open. The opener is just sliding along the surface.

In a way, this is what reading is like for kids who don't attach meaning to the words in the text. They read and read, skimming along the surface. Yet they never dig into the text and open up the meaning.

Our job as teachers, then, is to help those little can openers engage! When I work with students who show this tendency, I try to think about how I can help the students to move below the surface of the text to open up the meaning.

Previously, I wrote about how teachers can use drawings to help readers make meaning from text, as well as how you can use manipulatives. Today's strategy is quite simple, and yet is very effective with students.

I first saw this in my son's kindergarten class. I'm sure that it has a proper name, and is probably written up in a book somewhere. If you know, please leave a comment.

The premise is simple: Take a sentence from the text that has visual imagery, but is somewhat ambiguous. Before showing students the text, share this sentence with them, and have students draw a picture to show the visual image that they create.

Here's how it worked with students. I was reading "Wings in the Water" with them, from the 2/3 Toolkit Texts book. I chose these sentences to share:

"A huge, flat creature leaps out of the sea. It skims over the water and flips backward with a splash."

The two boys who read the sentences started talking about it right away. What could it be? A penguin? They discarded this idea. One of them said, "I think I know what it is, but I don't know its name. Maybe it's a shark." The other pointed out that a shark really isn't flat. As they talked about these sentences, they were using all of the habits of successful reader--going back to the text (just the two sentences), looking at the meanings of words, trying to wring every single detail from the clues.

After a few moments, I gave them the text, which is about manta rays. "Oh! So that's what they're called," one of the boys said. I noticed the other one going back to his picture and drawing a manta ray. Skilled readers experience that visual flicker of a changing mental image all the time. For less skilled readers, it's a kind of new feeling. We paused a bit and talked about how their ideas of the text had changed. What was it about? Now that they were looking at pictures of the topic, how did they match up with the two sentences they had read?

100+ aquarium pictures, no rays. Oh well!

Students who are word callers often don't dig around in sentences. With this activity, they have to look at each word and connect them to try to build some meaning. When they have built an idea, they may learn from looking at the text that they need to change their ideas--and this is okay. This is what skilled readers do all the time.

What I like most about this strategy is the simplicity of it. It doesn't require much preparation--just finding suitable sentences from the text, and coaching students through the process of drawing what they visualize. And yet the rewards can be worthwhile, getting students to engage with text and make new connections.

While it won't work for every text, it certainly is another good tool for helping students. One more thing to help open up those cans of meaning!