Entry 9: Fiction and Non-fictions texts

Characteristics	Fiction Texts	Non Fiction Texts
Characters	Make believe Animals that talk	About real things Real animals
Pictures	Illustrations represent the text	Photographs represent the text
Text	Use dialogue Beginning, Middle, End Setting Problem and solution	Headings Bold Print Glossary Table of Contents Maps/Graphs Captions
Information	Make believe Written from author’s imagination	Factual information Author does research
Main Purpose Vocabulary	To tell a story Simple and repetitive	To inform or describe Scientific and complex

All four books that I looked at to create this chart are leveled readers used during my reading groups. The two fiction books that I choose were, “The Lost Sheep” and “Mrs. Murphy’s Bears.” The two nonfiction books that I looked ate were “Bears, Bears, Bears” and “Who Lives Here?” All of the stories that I looked at were about animals.

The features that will support students learning to speak English include:
Detailed pictures that represent the text.
Familiarity of a common story line.
Headings help students understand what they are going to learn about.

The features that will be challenging include:
Difficult or unknown vocabulary
Text features: table of contents, glossary, maps and graphs.
Text Structure
Stories written from imagination because it is not something concrete and real that the students can relate to.
Some things that could help include preteaching difficult or unfamiliar vocabulary before students read a text and teach the different structures of each text so students know what to expect and how to use the nonfiction text features. I feel if you teach these features and students understand how and why they are helpful, nonfiction texts can be easier to understand because they provide more resources.