This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

In this article, I showcase an informational text reading comprehension unit that centers on text features commonly found in science textbooks. I taught this unit to a sixth-grade class and highlighted the work samples of three focal students here. The overarching question that guided this work was as follows: How can I focus my instruction on…

This article presents the concept of tri-texts as a potential next step from paired texts following a collaborative inquiry with fifth-grade students. Paired texts are two texts intertextually connected, whereas tri-texts are three texts connected this way. The authors begin the article with a short literature review highlighting some of the…

To craft engaging nonfiction prose, young writers should focus on a specific idea or concept of interest and use acclaimed children's books as mentor texts to help them understand options for developing their ideas. In this article, the authors provide examples of high-quality children's nonfiction for exploring various formats and text structures…

There is a growing awareness that reading and writing informational texts are important skills for functioning successfully in our current society. Informational texts provide purposeful and authentic reasons for reading and writing while enhancing children's vocabulary knowledge and content understanding. This article describes The Tools…

Comprehending expository reading material is a challenge for many students. Research has shown that students' expository reading comprehension can improve with the help of text structure instruction. The purpose of this article is to present teachers with a framework for effectively implementing text structure instruction in their classrooms.…