Text Structures Teaching Resources

Bring text structures to life in the classroom with text structure posters for your classroom walls, printable worksheets and downloadable Google Slides templates that easily break down the way authors organize information in a text.

Familiarity with different text structures is crucial for helping our students develop reading comprehension skills and become more confident readers. So how do you teach students all about text structures? We're so glad you asked!

Our teacher team has created hundreds of resources with this concept at the heart. With editable resources at the ready, you can save time on your lesson planning, so you have more time with your family!

Each resource in this ELA collection is curriculum-aligned to help students meet Common Core and state-level standards for understanding text structures. Each has undergone a thorough review by our teacher team to ensure it's ready for your students.

New to teaching text structure, or just looking for fresh ways to engage your students? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including a handy definition you can use to explain the meaning of text structure to your students.

What Is a Text Structure? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Whether you've been teaching students who've already passed this stage of literacy instruction or teaching classes for younger learners, you may need a quick refresher! Don't worry — the ELA teachers on the Teach Starter team are here to back you up with a simple definition you can use to explain text structures.

Text structures are thee different ways that an author has organized information within the text. These types of organization appear in both fiction and nonfiction texts.

Text structures help us use many of our reading comprehension strategies like visualizing, inferencing and monitoring comprehension.

6 Text Structure Examples to Share With Students

Looking for text structure examples to share with your students during your lessons? Here are some of the more common — and more helpful— text structures students may encounter in their reading:

1. Problem and solution
2. Chronological
3. Cause and effect
4. Inductive and deductive
5. Description
6. Sequence/process

How to Teach About Text Structures — Fun Ideas for Teachers

Looking for fun ideas for teaching text structures in the classroom? Try these tips from our teacher team!

1. Practice sequencing stories with cards that map out a familiar task — but only if students can put them in the right order!
2. Before reading a text featuring "cause and effect" out loud to the class, supply students with cause and effect graphic organizers. Students can be instructed to make notes of the different cause and effect examples they hear throughout your read-aloud.
3. Create a text structures anchor chart with your class to help break down the different ways authors organize information.
4. Add a text structures sorting activity to your reading center!