Animals Nobody Loves is the perfect mentor text to practice close reading! Jivey walks through the steps with this engaging text and offers a free downloadable task!

If you don’t mind a few screams and gasps from students while reading, I have got just the book for you!

The cover alone is enough to send some people running! Animals Nobody Loves by Seymour Simon** is a great non-fiction book on animals, of course. The book has 26 different pages/animals, each with its own short passage, making this book the PERFECT book to use for modeling close reading. Seymour Simon reveals the truth about nature’s most misunderstood animals and lets the reader decide what to really think about natures grossest, fiercest, and most fascinating survivors. (Amazon description)

**affiliate link- Amazon gives me a couple cents when you use this link and I use that money to help pay for my giveaways!**

Seymour Simon does an excellent job describing each animal in an engaging way. It’s really a great book to show how to make their non-fiction writing more interesting (because we know those can sometimes be the students’ most BORING pieces of writing…) while still maintaining the truth.

One thing I like to do with this book is to show the students one of the pictures FIRST. They work with a partner to decide what vocabulary words they are sure they will hear on that page.

As we read, they check off words on their list that were in the text, and add other important words. Then, they use these words to help summarize what we’ve read. It really works wonderfully because it keeps them from just “using” a sentence or two from the book, and it holds them accountable for using that important vocabulary!

I also want the students to get some practice with close reading strategies like summarizing, being able to locate explicit information, and identifying purpose in a text, to name a few. We practice this together for several days using some of the pages from this mentor text, and then I give them a task to complete on their own.

I have a great free task you can download to use with the page all about the octopus!

I suggest making the students a copy of the octopus page from the book so they will have the text in hand, and also so that they can mark the evidence in the text to answer these questions.

This mentor text is great for SO many skills and standards!
Check out this post where we integrated information from Animals Nobody Loves with the book, Vulture Verses, to write love poems!

This mentor text is one of TEN featured in my Better Than Basal Nonfiction Mini-Unit.

This mini-unit provides activities and other lesson ideas to help integrate non-fiction mentor texts into your reading and writing lessons!

Looking for ready-made, detailed, explicit mentor text lessons for the week?

Join the club!

No really… there’s a club!

Ever wonder how teachers who zip through their content actually get their students to retain? Learn how to cross over content to integrate your standards through the use of interactive notetaking and interactive activities. See how Jivey taught core reading standards while also teaching science (weather) content!

Teachers know it best: there isn’t enough time in the day!

So how do those teachers who seem to zip through their content actually seem to get their students to retain? I can tell you my favorite (and successfully proven) way:

INTEGRATION!

When you look at a long list of standards, do you think, how am I going to teach each of these individually?

If so, let me help you make a shift in that thinking.

CROSS OVER CONTENT

What is one of the main things we do to help students learn about a science or social studies topic?

PIN ME!

Read about it.

One of my very favorite ways to incorporate science standards into reading lessons (or… reading lessons into science standards) is to utilize interactive notetaking. This is not the same as the interactive notebooks with which you are probably familiar- but we’ll get to that, too!

Interactive notetaking requires close reading and annotating- in other words:

reading closely to determine what the text says explicitly; citing specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text…
determining central ideas of a text; summarizing the key supporting details and ideas…
interpreting words and phrases as they are used in a text…
analyzing the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to each other and the whole…
integrating and evaluating content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words

WHOA! All those things can be done with interactive notetaking?!

YES!

Let’s walk through the process.

WHILE you are reading and learning about forms of matter in science (or during reading time- either way, because as I stated above, you’re going to cover both!), you are going to require students to first, block out each paragraph in a different color, and then begin breaking down the explicit information within each of those paragraphs.

Starting with paragraph one, you and the students (and eventually, JUST the students) will read together and determine the key ideas and details that are most important from that section of text. The students will “cite” this important information by drawing and annotating on the opposite side of the page in the same color as that paragraph block. Using the same color will be important later when students make connections between paragraphs as they analyze the structure of the text.

Using pictures helps students connect the left brain and right brain work together- the information and text is connected to creativity and art. Continue the process with all paragraphs in the text. By the end of the process, students should have all of the most important points of the text drawn and noted.

Allow students to get with a partner and “READ” their pictures. This takes some practice, but it allows students to process what their pictures and notes mean by forming it all into sentences. For example, we wouldn’t want a student to say using the first paragraph from above, “matter properties looks like acts 3 solid liquid gas.” Yes that is literally reading what is there, but that makes absolutely NO sense!

Instead, students would process and form sentences like, “Matter has 3 forms. It can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. You can decide what form the matter is in by its properties, or the way it looks and how it acts.”

Check out this post where I gave a social studies example of interactive notetaking!

I know what you’re next question is…

HOW DO I FIND TEXTS?

I LOVE the website www.k12reader.com to get great passages for our Science and Social Studies topics! You can search between the grade levels and find passages on most everything you teach. The passage in the picture above came from this website!

I also have several articles and passages in my TPT store on various science and social studies topics!

WHAT ELSE?

Interactive activities, or “foldables” as you might know them, are another great way to have students:

read closely to determine what the text says explicitly; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text…
determine central ideas of a text; summarize the key supporting details and ideas…
interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text…

Here is one we worked on about precipitation during our weather unit:

They drew the precipitation types on the right flaps…:

…as well as defined each type of precipitation under the flaps! Of course, I let them use their resources to help them!

Students also showed their understanding of each stage of the water cycle by drawing the correct phase under each flap, which required them to integrate and evaluate content that had been taught:

If you’ve ever had that frantic feeling of trying to fit in all the standards, I hope this helps you take some deep breaths to see the ways it can be done through content integration!