Learning to identify text structures and learning about each text structure individually (chronological order, descriptive, cause and effect, problem and solution, compare and contrast) are especially helpful skills when you want your kids to improve their reading comprehension. They are also applicable to kids’ own writing, and to basic thinking skills as well.

Since text structures are related to so many language arts skills, I’ve focused on them lots of times when creating teaching resources and writing blog posts for language arts teachers.

Today’s post is a round-up of articles about teaching text structures. Included in the posts, you’ll find useful items including a text structure chart that you can download and a free text structure activity from my TPT store. If you are looking for resources rather than just ideas, you can find those in Classroom in the Middle’s store, and I’ll add links to some of them at the end of this post as well.

Here’s the round-up.

Twists and Turns – Teaching Text Structure with Kids’ Favorite Story Element – This first post is about teaching the text structure of Chronological Order. It pairs the text structure lesson with another type of reading lesson, one about the story element of plot.

Descriptive Text Structure and Revising – Pairing Reading and Writing Topics – As you can tell from the title, this one is about a lesson that combines objectives from more than one language topic too.

Cause and Effect – Teaching the Text Structure – Cause and effect is a great place to start your study of text structures. It’s not overly familiar to kids (like chronological order would be) but it’s easy to understand and fun to work with. I don’t think I mentioned this in the article, but a lesson on the cause and effect text structure would also pair well with and activity using cause and effect analogies.

Compare and Contrast – Teaching the Text Structure – Finding similarities and differences, using graphic organizers – there are lots of activities that go with this one, but have you thought about using the compare and contrast text structure to lead into a lesson on figurative language?

Text Structure Anchor Chart – Here’s the chart. Post it on your classroom wall or make copies for your kids notebooks.

Text Structure Activity Sheets with a Climate Theme – This post is about the text structure freebie in my TPT store. It’s a set of three free activity sheets with activities based on photos and reading passages. The content of all three worksheets is climate-themed. Four different text structures are addressed.

Now that I’ve completed this round-up, I see that I haven’t written about the problem and solution text structure yet, so that one will be coming up soon.

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