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3rd Grade · Reading · RI.3.5

Text Features Lesson Plan for 3rd Grade

A ready-to-teach text features lesson for 3rd Grade, built around headings, captions, glossaries and bold words, and reading labeled diagrams, tables, timelines and flow charts to answer questions. Print the plan, print the practice pages, and you are set.

Approximately 47 minutes

Learning objective

  • Use headings to find where a fact is
  • Use a glossary to learn a bold word
  • Answer questions with a diagram, table or timeline

Materials

Lesson steps

  1. 1. Build the background (5 min)

    Introduce text features in plain language and connect it to a book the class already knows. Write the key term where students can see it all lesson. For 3rd Grade, one clear sentence beats a full definition.

  2. 2. Read aloud and think aloud (I do) (10 min)

    Read a short passage aloud. Stop twice and narrate your own thinking about text features: what you noticed in the text and what made you notice it. Students are learning the move, not the answer.

  3. 3. Guided practice (we do) (12 min)

    Read a second passage together. This time students find the evidence and you record it. Push every answer back to the text with "what words told you that?"

  4. 4. Independent practice (you do) (15 min)

    Hand out "Text Features in an Article About Sloths". Students read and answer on their own. Circulate and ask individuals to point to the line in the text that supports their answer.

  5. 5. Share and close (5 min)

    Two or three students share an answer and the evidence behind it. Restate text features one final time in the students' own words, not yours.

Check for understanding

Ask each student to point to the evidence in the text for one of their answers. A student who has the right answer but cannot find the line has not yet learned text features.

Differentiation

Extra support. Students who stall: pull them into a small group and rebuild text features with concrete materials or a simpler text before asking for the written work again. Do not send the page home as homework, it will just rehearse the misunderstanding.

Extension. Students who finish early: ask them to write their own text features problem for a partner to solve, then check the partner's work. Creating a problem is harder than solving one and it surfaces whether they really understand text features.

Skills covered in this lesson

Text features practice

Practice pages for this lesson

6 items, 12 printable pages that match the independent-practice step.

Questions teachers ask about teaching text features

What are text features?
Text features are the parts of a nonfiction text besides the main paragraphs, like the title, headings, bold words, captions, diagrams and a glossary. They help a reader find and understand information quickly. Using them is part of RI.3.5.
Which text features are on these sheets?
Every article has headings and a glossary. Each one adds a main graphic, such as a labeled diagram of a sloth or a bicycle, a cutaway of a hot air balloon, a table about the Great Lakes, a ladybug life cycle, a glacier cross section, a Wilma Rudolph timeline, a tide zone diagram, a prairie dog burrow or a paper recycling flow chart.
How do I help my child use the glossary and headings?
Before reading, look at the headings together and guess what each part will be about. When a bold word comes up, find it in the glossary. The questions on page two ask which feature tells what a word means, so the habit pays off right away.
Is there an answer key for each worksheet?
Yes. All ten text features sheets have an answer key.

More reading lesson plans for 3rd Grade

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