Paws Along the Trail with Creating Iditarod Booklets

Matt Hall leaves Willow Lake in the 2018 Iditarod.

If your class followed the Iditarod, you will be surprised at what your students remember even at this time of the year.  As we review for the reading standardized state test, I am still using the Iditarod to motivate and engage my students.

A difficult concept is distinguishing between text features such as title, table of contents, headings, graphics, captions, etc. and text structures, or organization of text (sequence, cause/effect, description, problem/solution, compare/contrast).

To review these concepts, I split my students into groups to create a non-fiction booklet about any aspect of the Iditarod.  They needed to include specific text features and organize their text in a certain way from the list of text structures.  

They did the following:

1. Came up with their specific topic
2. Decided upon the text structure, or how they would organize the text
3. Split up the tasks for drawing graphics, creating the glossary, writing in text

Once their booklets were complete, they had analyzed and then synthesized both text features and text structures into their product. These were read and shared with the rest of the class so the text features and organization of each text could be identified.  I scanned their booklets and uploaded them to anyflip.com so they could see their work digitized with automatic page turning.  Students learned and were all engaged throughout this project!

Text Features and Text Structures Lesson

Electronic Anyflip Version