TEACHERNET Education Webspace - RPS

By Vivien Bowers (2006)

Summary

Crazy About Canada is a treasury of answers to Canadian kids' questions about their country. Its subtitle Amazing Things Kids Want to Know describes the eclectic contents. Divided into three categories - Highly Questionable Critters; This Land of Ours: Top to Bottom and Inside Out; Explain Yourselves, Canadians - children can find a topic that interests them. Colour photographs, interesting captions and text boxes provide information at many reading levels.

Strategies

The strategies described for this book are used with non-fiction. They differ from narrative text because they are used to search for information. The key strategies for non-fiction text are "questioning, summarizing and using text structures" (Lee, 2005, p.69)

Determining Importance

Guided Lesson on Conventions
(This lesson is based on Debbie Miller's book Reading with Meaning and looks at text structures.)

Can we find some conventions in the book Crazy about Canada that can help us find information? Let's start by looking at the whole book. What things do you see?

(Record on chart paper - the students and the teacher will jointly generate descriptions)

• Table of Contents

It lets us know that there are three main topics and the pages that they are on. We found it at the front of the book didn't we?

• Index

At the back of the book we found the index that tells us about all the topics that are in the book. They are listed in alphabetical order.

What are the things on the pages of the book that help us find out what is important on each page?

• Photographs and illustrations
  

All those pictures show us what is being described in the text. They help us know what something looks like and capture our interest, too.

• Labels/Captions

The pictures have words in cartoon bubbles. They tell us what the picture is about. Sometimes the authors have used a file card or special boxes on the page to help us understand the topic.

• Types of Print

The authors have used different types of print to make us stop and look. The topics have big letters. The blue letters show us questions that have answers in the text. Sometimes there is funny printing to make us look closely.

Is there a topic that you would like to find out about? Look at that page and see if you can find some of the things that we have just talked about.

2007 Diamond Willow Award Nominee - Crazy About Canada: Amazing Things Kids Want to Know

http://www.willowawards.ca/nomdescribe/crazy.htm