Welcome to one of our newest features – From the Classroom – sharing tips and tricks for integrating a love of middle grade books and authors into your classroom. This month we are looking at using text sets to build knowledge.
What are Text Sets?
A text set is a collection of sources that support a common theme, issue, or topic. This can include fiction of all types (books, short stories, picture books, etc.), non-fiction titles, poetry, images, newspaper articles, songs, interviews, and other primary and secondary sources. The goal is to move from a textbook or one text only classroom to a multi-text classroom where the focus becomes studying concepts more in-depth to help build knowledge rather than the content of just one text. This always reminds me of the “if you liked this book, you would enjoy reading this book” lists and infographics you might see at the library or online, but instead the goal is to be deliberate about helping our students become mini-experts on a topic!
Mary Ann Cappiello and Erika Thulin Dawes recommend the following steps to build text sets:
- Start with the content – What do the students need to know/what concept do you need to teach? It’s great to have a middle grade text serve as your anchor for the text set.
- Build the text set – Find all sorts of material that will support the concept you will be teaching.
- Organize the texts – What will you read first? Second? At the same time? Why?
- Responding to the Text – What will you have the students do before/during/after reading?
A great place to start is with your standards to figure out what topics or concepts to teach and what students should know and be able to do with these topics and concepts.
Sample Text Sets
Below are a fiction and a non-fiction text set for any middle grade classroom.
Fiction
Studying fictional characters in class? Why not change it up and study villains instead of the usual boring, goody two-shoes heroes! Think of all the conversations you could have about villain character motivations, villain character’s impacting the plot, irony, and more. You could probably build a villain text set around anything, but since it’s the holiday season, I thought a great picture book tie-in would be How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Use that in conjunction with a clip of Scar’s song “Be prepared” from the Lion King and examine the lyrics, specifically. Finally, read any great middle grade novel with a great villain (I chose Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer), and you have a high-interest text set about villains!
Non-Fiction
I recently picked up Dan Sasuweh Jone’s latest Stealing Little Moon: The Legacy of the American Boarding Schools. What’s great about middle grade non-fiction books is they come complete with a well-researched bibliography which are perfect for creating text sets. Taking from this bibliography, a great text set could include reading portions if not all of the book, examining a picture of a student before and after they entered a school, and reading a newspaper article about the federal government’s response.
Main Text
Picture of Hastiin To-Haali before entering school and as Tom Torlino after being in school
Article: Interior Department leaders decry traumatic legacy of federal boarding schools for Native American children by Rob Manning
Don’t forget to check out the National Park Service’s amazing article for teaching ideas (complete with standards, objectives, and activities) about this topic!
Bonus: Need help with students who might not be reading at grade level? Check out the Middle School TopicReads at TextProject.org
Where to Start?
Take a look at some of the many books recommended here on the Mixed Up Files and then start finding other texts, resources, poetry, images, and primary and secondary sources to support your topic and standards.
In the comments, share your favorite text sets you already use in the classroom or are thinking about using in the future!
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