Excellent Books for Teaching Text Features to Primary Grades
Teaching text features is one of my favorite units in every grade I have taught! There is so much opportunity for activities and high interest engagement with your lessons.
Things to Think About When Choosing Books to Teach Text Features
Almost every non-fiction book can be used to teach text features. You want to make sure that you choose the perfect book for your students and the concept you want to teach. It is important to think through the following points when choosing the perfect mentor text.
- Student interests
- Topics related to other current areas of study (social studies or science topics)
- Reading levels
- Student prior knowledge on text features- for example if students are not familiar with titles then finding a title/ subtitle heavy book would be a good place to start
- Which features you want to highlight and discuss for that lesson
Below are pictures and links to my top picks for modeling and think aloud for how to interpret them with my primary students. These topics are usually high interest and engaging!
Mentor Texts for Teaching Text Features
- The Way the Cookie Crumbled
- The Story of Ruby Bridges
- The Sugary Secrets Behind Candy
- School Then and Now
- From Seed to Plant
- National Geographic Kids- Bears
- Galaxies, Galaxies!
I have a tip that I want to share with you that I have noticed throughout teaching non-fiction books. USE THE BOOKS OVER AND OVER. Seriously! No, the students will not get bored of them (if they are chosen correctly to be high interest), and YES they will benefit from looking at the same text through the lens of different text features and even various non-fiction reading skills.
It is beneficial when teaching text features to have anchor charts displayed in your classroom showing an example and explanation of each text feature. Then, as you are reading the mentor text you can reference the text feature anchor charts to model how students should do that as they are reading independently.
Check out my mentor text suggestions for other non-fiction skills!
Read more about how I use this astronaut theme to teach text features for primary grades!
Affiliate links were used in this blog post.
