Developing an informational text is like designing a building—if the structure is weak, it will not stand. A language arts video provides an overview of the five types of text structure. A catchy song and specific examples help give a short overview of each structure, including compare and contrast, cause and effect, description, sequence, and problem and solution.

Concepts

informational texts, nonfiction text features, text structure, reading comprehension

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Additional Tags

english language arts

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Instructional Ideas

• Share paragraphs or short excerpts from texts that model different types of text structure and have learners identify the structure
• Brainstorm a topic for an essay, and then come up with ideas for a paper that fits each type of text structure (i.e; a paper on baseball might describe the basics of baseball, compare and contrast the two different leagues, explain the cause and effect of playing for a travel team, etc.)

Classroom Considerations

• Loosely connects to Common Core by introducing text structure, but does not delve into analysis
• Assumes knowledge of basic sentence structure and parts of speech
  

• This video is hosted on YouTube

Pros

• Shows the words to the song on the screen while the video plays
• Includes fun images to make the video more interesting to viewers

Cons

Common Core

RI.6.5 RI.7.5 RI.8.5 RI.9-10.5 RI.11-12.5