Common Core Part 2: Moving Forward with Informational Text
Introduction
In an earlier installment, we addressed the shift to engaging students with more informational text in the course of their instructional day. We explained how we got to this point, what it might mean for you in your daily work, and we provided sources of some great non-fiction books for your students.
We know that it is not enough to simply provide students with quality works of literature and informational text. To promote their understanding of increasingly more complex texts we need to help students adopt a metacognitive stance, step back, look at a given text as a whole, and analyze its individual parts to discover how they are related and how they contribute to the whole. That is the intent of the Common Core's College and Career Readiness Anchor Standard #5 for Reading, which deals with text structure. Similarly, the Common Core requires students to write informative/explanatory pieces, so to continue moving forward with the reading and writing of informational text, this month we will take a closer look at how you can explicitly teach organizational patterns in reading and have students apply these patterns in their writing.