Text Mapping Non Fiction Text

I'm in love.

I'm in love with text mapping. I wish I would have came across this earlier in the year, but nevertheless, it's here and it's here to stay!

Text mapping involves marking non-fiction text in order to understand text features. It's a pretty specific system and I'm committed! Love it.

First of all, the text that will be mapped is presented in scroll form. Pages of the text are laid out in a sequence rather than a book style where they turn pages.

Old school


New school


You feelin' it yet?

And here's my beautiful take on scrolls. I found some old Boys Life and American Girl magazines in a magical closet in the school library. For the long, fancy, small group articles I ripped out the magazine cover and table of contents as well. I glued them to posterboard and voila! I eventually got lazy after 3 or 4 of these and stopped gluing them to posterboard. I'm having everything laminated so it really doesn't make much of a difference.

I also found some cool 2 page articles for independent/paired work.

Using text mapping is typically done in small group because it's hands on and very interactive. You could try it with a whole class, but I wouldn't do that to your self lol :) The scrolls are usually placed on the floor but I would rather have it on a white board so we could make notes. Like this:

<---Can't do this on the floor. Advantage white board!

<--or lay it out. Note: This is not me! I had this up on my computer and one of my students was like "Miss, is that you?" :)

When we map it we are going to look for text features. This includes but is not limited to:

• Headings & Subheadings
• Captions & Sidebars
• Bold print & Italics
• Glossary, Index, and Table of Contents

At first we are going to use post-its (a lovely idea from my coworker Cobia!). I will give them post it's and ask them to identify text features. They can write what the text feature is and then place it on the scroll on the item. Example, place a "Heading" post it on the heading. They could also use multi colored dry erase markers if you laminate your scrolls.

We are going to incorporate several of our reading strategies including predicting, summarizing, and main idea vs. details. It's important to know what text features are how they work together. Be prepared for some tough times with the vocabulary. For example, some learners may have a hard time distinguishing a caption from a sidebar.

All images (other than the two from my scrolls) are from an the Text Mapping Project. Please visit their site at TextMapping.org