In the past few years, teaching using nonfiction has been increasingly important, with an equal emphasis supposed to be put on nonfiction, as fiction. However, nonfiction is packed with content, making it harder to read and understand. Students struggle to understand the content and can get overwhelmed when reading large sections of nonfiction, such as in a textbook.
There are many tools and strategies to teach students to be able to read nonfiction effectively and to do that, I like to start with shorter nonfiction reading passages rather than huge amounts of text. It makes focusing on the new strategy easier when students do not have to struggle through a long passage. Plus, you can easily add short texts in a variety of topics to go along with the subjects that you are teaching.
Here are four ways that I like to use short nonfiction reading passages in my teaching:
HIGHLIGHT AND OUTLINE
You’ve had students that highlight the entire page of text because they think everything is important. It’s hard to teach highlighting in giant segments of text, and even harder when it’s coming out a textbook or picture book that they aren’t allowed to write in. To teach highlighting nonfiction text, I like to focus on one paragraph at a time, and a passage with only four or five paragraphs is best. Go through the first together as a class with you modeling what to highlight, the second and third highlight with guidance from the students, and then they do the last paragraph or two on their own.
When I model, I go through each sentence at a time, focusing on the main ideas first, and then finding the details, but rather than highlighting each word, only doing the important words like names and dates get highlighted.
Annotating or underlining also work best by starting with small passages.
Outlining is a long arduous process anyway, but especially when you are first teaching it. I teach note taking with number notes, which organizes the information with an outline following this structure.
Notice that all of the main ideas are numbered as a one, rather than making the next one a two. Giving all of the hierarchies the same number makes it easier for students to understand the structure. That being said, having a passage with only 4 or 5 paragraphs is idea for this as well, because students will likely be writing a full page already, just with a few paragraphs.
CONTENT VOCABULARY
Nonfiction is a wonderful tool for teaching content vocabulary. However, often, there are so many words that students don’t know that it’s hard to pick out just a few. Sure, the ultimate goal is for them to learn them all. However, students learn vocabulary best when you’re not doing a large list at one time, but rather focusing on one word at a time, and analyzing it with morphology, synonyms, sentences, and connecting to prior knowledge. Being able to choose two or three words from a short passage is a less overwhelming amount.
FLUENCY PASSAGES
Okay, this doesn’t have to be just for nonfiction, but it works so well with any printed passage… I take my passage, laminate it, and then have students use the passage for fluency practice. I give each student a whiteboard marker and their own minute timer. Students start their minute timer and then start reading. When the minute ends, students use the whiteboard marker to mark how far in the passage they made it before the timer went off. Then they repeat the process two more times, trying to get further in the passage and increase the fluency of their reading.
Remember that fluency is not simply fast reading. Students should be trying to mimic their normal speech by pausing at punctuation, reading in phrases, etc. You’ll want to go over this with your students beforehand so that they don’t rush.
ANY NEW COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
Finally, any new nonfiction comprehension strategy that you are teaching can best be taught using short passages. By using shorter text, students can practice the comprehension strategy multiple times without getting overwhelmed. It is also easier for teachers to model with a short text in a mini-lesson, have students read and work in pairs or individually without devoting the entire class period to trying to decipher the passage.
Short passages are simply easier to work with at the beginning, where students will then move on to longer passages once their beginning to master the strategies to reading nonfiction effectively.
GRAB THE NONFICTION READING PASSAGES FREEBIE
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MORE NONFICTION READING PASSAGES
Some of the activities seen in my post came from the following resources. Click on the pictures below to take a look.
Hopefully these tips help you in your quest to make these strategies more attainable for students.
Happy teaching.
