4th Grade Construction

An important skill for fourth grade students reading non-fiction articles is effectively using titles, subtitles, headings, and captions.  These text features should be used to help them understand what they are reading and to get to the main idea of an article.  Sometimes these text features are not as helpful as they should be, so students also need to think about them critically.  A lesson I’ve done in the past is to have students read articles with the title, subtitle, headings, and captions covered up.  Then we discuss what we think it is mostly about and then we come up with the text features ourselves.  Different ideas are given and discussed, then we come up with a consensus and compare them with the author’s.

Doing this lesson through a wiki would give all the students the opportunity to contribute ideas and give them a chance to read others’ ideas, reflect, and comment on them.