Text Structures Teaching Resources

Bring text structures to life in the classroom with text structure posters for your classroom walls, printable worksheets and downloadable text structure slide decks that break down the way authors organize information in a text, plus so many more teacher-created resources!

Familiarity with different text structures is crucial for helping our students develop their 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!

What Is a Text Structure?

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.

Text structure is a term that refers to the different ways that an author has organized information within the text. Students will find these types of organization in both fiction and nonfiction texts along the way, and they will also find that they help with reading comprehension.

Text structures can help students with key reading comprehension strategies like visualizing, inferencing and monitoring comprehension.

Text Structure Examples

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:

Problem and solution
Chronological
Cause and effect
Inductive and deductive
Description
Sequence/process

Teaching Text Structures

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

Practice sequencing stories with cards that map out a familiar task — but only if students can put them in the right order!
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.
Create a text structures anchor chart with your class to help break down the different ways authors organize information.
Add a text structures sorting activity to your reading center!