 Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me for Elements of Reading Text Features. As teachers, we know that text features are important to point out and to use in our instruction. Today we'll talk a little bit more about why they're important, what they can help students understand better, and how we can incorporate them into a close reading lesson. Let's listen as two students describe how they're using text features. Physics textbook? Oh, no. This is just a mystery kind of. A mystery novel? You? No way. Here, she got away in a sky cart. A sky cart? It's really cool. It's like a go-kart with a parachute on it so it can fly. Here, look at this diagram. So the propeller on the back and the parachute gives it left size of the engine. That has to be pretty loud. It seems like it would be pretty easy to follow someone in one of these. That's why this is such a mystery. For which way the robber went? It shows the direction the cart was last seen traveling. What are these arrows for? That's the direction the wind was blowing. Have you ever searched the woods? I'm sure they did. A hike after school today? So we can see here that two students really dug deep into a text and understood it more closely by reading those text features. So why teach text features? Well, they help us navigate, understand, and visualize information from a nonfiction text. What are the text features? Text features are all of the components of a story or article that are not the main body of text. So let's see some examples of those. Different text features that we use with our students are a table of contents, captions, graphs and labels, timelines, font styles, sidebars, glossaries, headings and subheadings, maps, illustrations, and indices. We're used to using all of these important text features with our students, but do we know to own text features? Do we know how to point them out and have them help the students dig a little bit deeper? It leads us to the question of how can text features be incorporated into a close reading lesson. Well, we're going to use them to understand that text at that deeper level. The first read in close reading usually asks, what does the text say? This is the place where we ask those very literal questions, and so we're going to ask literal questions this time focused on the text features. And of course these can be incorporated with many other literal questions as you do a close reading lesson. Some examples of what those questions could be are, what route on the map shows the path of the Oregon Trail? Or looking at the graph, which year showed the highest population increase? Or what event happened before the invention of the cotton gin on the timeline? So again, there are those right there questions that the students can answer using evidence from their text, or from the text features in this case, to get to know the surface level of that text. On the second read, we focus on how does the text work? What's the author's craft? What word choices are they making? What vocabulary are they using? What organizational patterns help us in this text? Some examples of questions on a second read, when we're focusing on text features could be, why did the author choose that graph? What did he want us to know? Concerning graphs we might also ask, why a bar graph instead of a pie graph? Why did they use a line graph there instead of a pictograph? How does this diagram help us understand the concept? Why did the author put a diagram in the story? Would it be hard to understand without that diagram? Why is that word bolded? Why is it added to the glossary? Would meaning be lost if it was left out of the glossary? Why does the author choosing these words as the most important words? And on our third read we really focus on what does the text mean. And this is when we really get to our highest level of thinking. We ask questions that require that use of evidence, but we're wanting the students to synthesize, to infer to really go beyond what the text actually says and put those pieces together to do higher level thinking. We might ask questions like, what evidence from the text and text feature supports the claim? What does the satirical cartoon tell us about the author's purpose? Or how does the illustration differ from what the author said? These are questions that the students can't just point to in the text. But they might be able to use some of the text evidence to draw upon a conclusion or to make that inference that hasn't been blatantly told to them. Thank you for joining me for a quick look at text features and how they can be used in a close reading lesson.