Nonfiction Reading Part Two: Text Structure

In the fall, I read so many books about sharks with my student, who asked me for more shark books every time I saw her. This spring, we created our own book about sharks organized by topics such as habitat, diet and physical characteristics. Many nonfiction texts are organized this way: creating a KWL organized by topics can help students anticipate this type of text structure before they read. I saw a great guided reading lesson at a workshop with Irene Fountas where she demonstrated that a picture book may have both an overlying structure such as a narrative and an underlying structure, such as describing the life cycle of an animal. 

I’ve also been encountering many books such as Surprising Sharks that have a persuasive message, in this case that sharks aren’t as aggressive towards humans as we might have been led to believe. (A colleague calls this structure  “exploding the myth.”) These books often have an environmental message as well. Suprising sharks concludes that sharks should be more afraid of humans than we are of sharks. There are many books like this about other animals; for example, Bats by Gail Gibbons and Seymour Simon’s Wolves.  

As an avid reader of fiction from childhood, I’m used to reading for plot and don’t always pay close attention to text structure. I need to plan to be explicit about text structure for nonfiction as my student and I continue to explore books on high interest nonfiction topics.

Pokemon Literacy Connections

Another burgeoning area of interest for that daughter of mine is Pokemon. Last July, My brother-in-law got a bunch of Pokemon cards for Solana and her cousin to trade on a hot summer evening in Chicago. They spread out the cards and got involved in some very intense trading. Then I kind of forgot about it. But recently, Solana has been scrutinizing her cards, giving us cards to trade with her, reading and requesting Pokemon books, and watching the television series.

I remember the whole Pokemon thing when I was working in what was then district six in Washington Heights. Even sixth graders were completely obsessed with it. I thought of Pokemon as some cute marketing ploy to get kids to buy the cards. Now I’m thinking I missed out on a teaching opportunity: I didn’t realize the literacy potential for this interest. As I read the Pokemon books or watch the show with my daughter, I’m seeing parallels to reading non-fiction, especially the idea of classification in science. For example, the Pokemon Junior Handbook series has stats on each page, with a pronunciation guide and the Pokemon’s type, weight and height as well as a sidebar “fun fact," much like the structure of early science readers. The more advanced Sinnoh Hall of Fame has quite a bit of text, with topics and subtopics such as “Who’s Who in Sinnoh.” The whole idea of “Sinnoh,” this alternate imaginary world, could also be a precursor to fantasy books when Pokemon fans get older.

I have always felt reluctant to promote books that are written for commercial content because they’re so poorly written and are basically the company's marketing extensions. I remember last year a teacher was reluctant to buy Bakugan books for the Bakugan-crazy boys in her classroom for the same reason. Of course, I’ll always prefer well written children’s literature and nonfiction to a commercial series. But if a young reluctant reader is obsessed with Bakugan and that’s going to get him into reading, shouldn’t that be an important part of the equation? And shouldn’t we be looking into the potential of student interests to expand them as readers of both fiction and nonfiction?