Introduction to Genres

 Genre can be a hard concept for students, yet I find when we explicitly teach students how to look for certain aspects, such as genre and text structure, they do very well. I designed an intro to genres for some of my reading groups and used it last week. 

I kept it pretty basic and introduced what genre means and then talked about Fiction and Non-Fiction. We discussed Realistic Fiction and Fantasy. This can be tricky for students as they often will think Realistic Fiction is Non-Fiction because of the term real. We also talked a little about Poetry and Informational Text. I wanted to give my students these terms so as we really get into close reads, they understand how genre can impact how we read a text. 

After our discussion, we looked at 4 different text examples to identify the genre. Here is a video of one of my groups exploring the text. It was so fun to let them really look at each text and make some comparisons. The conversation was great.

I used this with 2 of my groups. One group, we discussed and they read on their own. The other group we discussed and I read aloud. If you are interested in using this with your students, check out the lesson on TPT.