Must Read Science Mentor Text- Nonfiction Book for Weather

Hi there!

I realized that a lot of times when I choose a mentor text, it's generally fiction.  With common core, I need to be sure I am incorporating more nonfiction!!

I do think it's more difficult to use a nonfiction text as a mentor text (using the same text all week, finding a mentor sentence, etc.) but it's possible!

I have a great book in my classroom library that I think is a fabulous nonfiction text for our unit on weather!

First off, it's by National Geographic Kids!  I think they do a phenomenal job of using text features and photos to really capture a student's attention!  Here are some of the pages from the inside of the book (courtesy of Amazon):

As you can see, there are text features and facts galore in this book!  Photos, captions, table of contents, index, headings, subheadings, and on and on!

Here is a graphic organizer that I have used when we talk about the importance of nonfiction text features.

Yes, it's plain, but that's ok!  :O)  If you'd like it, you can click the picture of the graphic organizer and download it!  Please leave feedback if you do.  :O)

The way I used this with my class is each student had a nonfiction text.  They worked in partners (they all had the same text) and only used the text features from the book to find facts and information (instead of reading the body of the text).  Then, they filled in the graphic organizer.  They wrote the chapter and page number, the information they learned, and the text feature they used (from the word bank at the top).  This is just one way for them to see how much information they can get even just from the text features.  

So, an example using the book above, maybe in the first chapter, they read a caption and learn that most animals need shelter during a storm and us a hole for shelter.  They would fill this out on the graphic organizer.  They did not have to read anything but the caption to learn this.  That's what I am trying to show them!  You can learn something everywhere, but not only that, they can add captions (or other text features) in THEIR informational writing and give information there, not just in the body of their paper.

If you have any questions or need any clarification, please let me know!  I hope you find this helpful!
Amanda

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