 As a grade 5 class at Wheatland Crossing School prepares to learn about the importance of text features, the teacher begins by reading a fiction passage. She then compares this with a non-fiction passage. This helps to prepare them for the upcoming text feature hunt using their social studies, voices in Canada, and text books. Three differences, go! Explicit instructions and recognizing text features helps to improve comprehension and convey author intent. Learning about how the text is organized using features such as headings, italics, bold text, pictures, graphs, and timelines provides insight into the key ideas and supportive details. These insights facilitate understanding and foster thinking about the text. As a strategy to anticipate information, student comprehension of non-fiction texts can be increased by students' recognition of textual cues, visuals, and organization of the text. I think it's important to realize that this is just not a skill that you're born with. I think so many of us take for granted that we know what a title is, we know what a heading is, we know that this picture is trying to give us more information about what we've just read. You really have to break it down. We're in a society now where so much information is thrown at us all the time. How we interpret that information needs to come down to the tools that we're given. They're not given to us at birth. They're not given to us in grade one. It's when we start seeing more non-fiction texts in the higher level grades that we really need to make sure the foundation and the tools of text features are really established. So that these kids are ready to take on these texts and digest these texts in the best way that they can without overwhelming them. While the students work collaboratively through the text feature hunt, Alex circulates around the room assessing the student's ability to find and record examples of text features. He is checking to see if the students are finding examples of text features and are wondering why the authors have included the text features that they have. Alex finds the whole group in smaller breakout groups effective. The heading breaks the full paragraph down into just a small thing. It tells it what it's about. Text features are great for promoting more meaningful predictions around the content being studied, learning how information is organized in a text, anticipating learning, and locating information in a text. So then if you need to make sure Ms. Catholic knows one part, you can bold it or slant it. And yeah, you can just... So there's important stuff that you can show her without having to tell her. So the small groups allow me to really target which kids are really clicking and which kids are not so that I can give extra instruction. I find the biggest successes with these kids is right away they're able to look at a page and decide what it's going to be about, how they're going to tackle it, what the tools they're going to need, the highlighters, whether they're going to take anecdotal notes. And the kids that are struggling, I'm able to pull them aside while the other kids are working on this and really give them that intervention and pinpoint the areas that are not exactly clicking with them yet so that they can use text features as a tool for them when they're reading as well. Because I know what the heading is so that I can see what the whole entire thing is about. And then the title tells me what the page or the chapter is about. Yeah, because in the textbook I'm nervous, like if I don't know a word, then I'm not going to understand the whole class and then I could look in the glossary. So before I find when you ask a student to look up some information in a textbook or in a non-fiction book or even on the internet, right away they've grown or they're completely disinterested and disconnected when they see the amount of text on a page. Whereas after we've talked about the text features and the tools that can help us, they're willing to commit more to a page that might have a complete text block or might have some charts that they might not understand right away but they're willing to take a little bit more of a risk in reading because they know they don't have to read the entire thing. They can chunk it, they can use the headers, they can use the captions and understand what they're reading in sections rather than trying to group it as a whole.