Teaching Informational Text with Magazines

Next Sports Illustrated Kids Giveaway Deadline: December 14th

With the Common Core emphasis on teaching informational text, you might be wondering where to find appropriate texts for reading instruction. Most classrooms are overflowing with great children's literature and novels, but many schools lack a good selection of interesting nonfiction texts.

If you enjoy reading magazines yourself, the solution to that problem is right in front of you! As it turns out, children's magazines are a great source of informational texts. The articles are short, interesting, and appropriate for children. They often use a variety of different text structures and text features so they make excellent practice passages for working with nonfiction. In fact, many reading selections on state tests are very close in structure and format to magazine articles.

The challenge is finding enough copies of magazines for your classroom and knowing how to use them effectively. I'd like to share a few of my favorite sources as well as some tips for using them. I'm also going to give away at least one subscription to a children's magazine at the end of this blog post.

Weekly Classroom Magazines

The most obvious place to look is to find a classroom magazine like Time for Kids and Scholastic News. I preferred Scholastic News and used it every year with my students. It was a great way for students to practice informational text reading and keep up with current events.

Since a new issue arrived almost every week, it was easy to integrate it into my literacy instruction and sometimes into science or social studies. We used it with small guided reading groups and reading mini lessons. It was easy to have students read and respond to the articles with graphic organizers or in journals. Because everyone had a copy of the same text and the magazine belonged to them, they could use highlighters to practice reading strategies and it was easy to discuss together. I also used it for "paired reading" practice as shown in this picture. You may be able to get your school or PTA to fund them since they are quite inexpensive, and if you are a public school teacher in the US, you can get them through DonorsChoose.

Monthly Children's Magazines
Weekly magazines have many advantages and should be a part of any classroom, but they don't have quite the appeal of a traditional magazine like National Geographic for Kids or American Girls. Monthly magazines are larger, more colorful, and have a wider variety of different types of content. Unfortunately, they are also more expensive and only send out a few issues each year, so it takes a while to build up a collection of them. It's also harder to figure out what to do with them because each issue is unique.

How to Obtain Monthly Magazines for Your Classroom
Where can you get these magazines? Here are a few ideas:

• You can start by asking your school librarian if they have collections of back issues that they will let you check out and bring to your classroom. If you do this, be sure to write down the number of copies of each title and count them at the end of reading class to be sure they have all been returned.
• Magazine subscriptions are available through Amazon.com, so you can now create a DonorsChoose proposal for a variety of children's magazines. The prices range between $15 and $33 per subscription, so you could request up to 10 different magazines and keep your proposal under $400. Most proposals under $400 are quickly funded.
• You can ask parents to send in old issues of children's magazines, but make it clear that the magazines must be kid-friendly and are subject to your approval before they can be read in class.
• Establish a "Classroom Magazine Fund" and ask parents to donate money to help you purchase classroom magazine subscriptions. You can customize and send the letter shown above.
• Ask parents to donate a magazine subscription to the classroom. See customizable letter above for sample wording.
• Some airline frequent flyer programs will let you use frequent flyer miles to purchase magazines. Both Delta and American Airlines participate in a program called Mags for Miles, and the current offer includes Sports Illustrated Kids. I've decided to use some of my points to give away a few subscriptions to that magazine. See details below.

Recommended Children's Magazines

The easiest place to look for children's magazines is on Amazon.com. Even if you don't plan to purchase them there, reviews are really helpful. By reading those reviews, I discovered that some magazines are full of advertisements and even include content that's not completely appropriate for that age group. Some of my favorite children's magazines are National Geographic for Kids, Discovery Girls, Sports Illustrated for Kids, and Ranger Rick. The reviews also looked good for Cricket, Ask, and Calliope. What are your favorite magazines? Please share your suggestions with us.

How to Use Monthly Magazines
Monthly magazines are harder to use for instruction because each issue unique. Therefore, the articles aren't particularly good for small group instruction. However, they can be used for partner reading activities or for whole group mini lessons if you have a document camera and can project the article on a Smartboard.

My students also enjoyed reading magazines during our "Magazine Power Hour" which was a special activity each month, often taking place right before holidays when kids were restless. This activity is described in detail in my book, Power Reading Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide, and there's a nice printable to use with the strategy.  The gist of the idea is that you conduct the activity in place of your regular reading instruction and provide time for students to read magazines for a whole hour. Because that's a long block of time to read, I had my students read their chosen magazine for 15 minutes and then meet with a reading buddy for a brief discussion about what they had read and learned. They repeated this two more times, and at the end they wrote a written reflection about their favorite article.

Sports Illustrated for Kids Giveaway - Deadline is Thursday, December 14th

As I mentioned above, some airlines have a "Mags for Miles" program where you can get magazines for free. It just so happens that I have some extra miles from Delta Airlines, and I'd like to use them to donate a free subscription to Sports Illustrated Kids to a few of my readers. I have enough miles for at least 5 subscriptions in that account, and I may be able to order more.

If you want to win a subscription for your classroom, please enter using the Rafflecopter entry form below. 

Be sure to enter by midnight Pacific time on Thursday, December 14th. This is a new contest, so if you entered before and didn't win, please enter again. You must complete all of the entries in the Rafflecopter app to be eligible to win.

Also, this contest is only open to classroom teachers in the US due to mailing restrictions for the magazines, and winners must be a current subscriber to Candler's Classroom Connections or be willing to be added to my mailing list.

Even if you don't obtain classroom subscriptions of magazines for your classroom, I hope you'll consider letting your students bring them to school and read them from time to time. You'll want to check and approve any magazines students bring from home, of course, because many popular magazines are not appropriate for kids. However, I think you'll find that bringing magazines into your classroom will have a huge impact on your students and their attitudes towards informational text. Happy reading!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tips for Teaching Informational Text

About the only thing we can count on in education is that something is always changing! Our society changes, technology changes, our students are changing, and as a result, the curriculum is constantly evolving. Change can be exciting, but often it’s frustrating as well. This is especially true when it comes to the Common Core Reading Standards and the new emphasis on informational text. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to explore this aspect of the CCSS while writing Graphic Organizers for Reading: Teaching Tools Aligned with the Common Core. Now I’d like to share some of those tips and strategies for teaching informational text with you.

Comparing and Contrasting Text Types

One of the best ways to get started is to have your students compare informational text with literature. Sounds like the perfect time for a Venn diagram, doesn’t it?  Show your students several examples of both types of books, and ask them to help you brainstorm how those text types are alike and different. Record their ideas on a class Venn diagram. If you have a document camera, use it to display the pages of the book so that everyone can see all of the features on each page clearly. If you don’t have a document camera, ask the students at the back of the room to move closer and have a seat on the floor near you.

Choosing the Right Informational Text
Most students are very familiar with fiction, but they may not be nearly as familiar with nonfiction. That’s why it’s important to select just the right informational text to use for this lesson, something that includes a variety of nonfiction text features. Last year I discovered the perfect book for this activity. Did you know that Rachel Lynette of the Minds in Bloom blog is the author of over 70 nonfiction books for kids? In fact, she has a nice Informational Text Structures freebie that you'll want to check out. Rachel sent me a copy of Gravity: Forces and Motion, and it turned out to be just what I needed as an anchor text for my Informational Text Features Search lesson. If force and motion are not a part of your curriculum, take a look at Rachel Lynette's other nonfiction books on Amazon.com. I'm sure you'll find something that fits in with what you are teaching now or will be teaching later in the year.

When you display a nonfiction book like Gravity: Forces and Motion, your students will see at a glance that informational texts look quite different from literary ones. Within a few minutes, they will identify many details to add to your class Venn diagram. As you can see from this snapshot of Rachel’s book, informational text elements often include numbered steps, headings and subheadings, illustrations with captions, and so on. Explain to your students that these items are referred to as “text features,” and the author includes them to help make the text easier to understand. As you discuss each feature, ask your students how it helps them to comprehend, or understand, the text.

Informational Text Features Search Freebie

After your students become aware that informational texts are different from literary ones, they can apply their knowledge to text of their own choosing. Because I included this lesson in Graphic Organizers for Reading, the easiest way for me to share it with you is to give you the directions and graphic organizer as a freebie. Click the image or this link to download your copy. Before teaching the lesson, gather a collection of books on a variety of topics that include many different informational text features. If you don’t have enough of these types of texts in the classroom, it’s worth a visit to the school library to hand pick books on a variety of topics and reading levels. Or you can schedule a class visit to the library and ask your students to find informational books on topics that interest them.

Combo Book Giveaway
Last year when Rachel sent me her book, Gravity: Forces and Motion, she also sent me a second autographed copy to pass along to one of my followers in a giveaway. Since she generously donated one of her books, I’ve decided to donate one of mine, too. These two books are a natural combination because Gravity is actually one of the recommended texts in Graphic Organizers for Reading: Teaching Tools Aligned with the Common Core. Even if you don’t teach science, you can use Rachel’s book in conjunction with the lessons in my book to help your students become more comfortable with reading informational text. Before you know it, your students will discover that nonfiction books can open doors to worlds they never knew existed!




Note: The giveaway end at 9 p.m. EST on September 10th. I'll be selecting and notifying the winner soon.