Informational Reading Skill Worksheets for Kindergarten Readers
July 19, 2021 by admin
Students enter kindergarten with a wide variety in their knowledge base. Kindergarten is the time in their life where students begin to read to learn new facts about the world around them.
Throughout the kindergarten year, they begin their understanding of what text is! Some students have a stronger understanding based on their exposure to books at home, but for others, this can be their first time truly interacting with text. These beginning years of school really focus on learning to read. As they age and their skills progress, they start really reading to learn. This fact is not to lessen the impact of their learning in their younger school years, but to point out that comprehension and critical thinking necessary to deeply absorb information comes later once they are beyond the struggles of the features of text and language.
In kindergarten there are lots for children to learn! They are exposed to informational nonfiction text often and introduced to topics and ideas they otherwise wouldn’t be.
There are skills necessary to help students decipher informational text. TheWorksheets.com provides many worksheets that can be used to grow their independence to manipulate text which will aid them in learning across all disciplines.
Informational Reading Skills for Creating an Informed Kindergarten Reader
The ELA standards identify a set of skills students must master before they can become fluent informational readers. These skills include the key ideas and details, the craft and structure, and integration of knowledge and ideas. These skills are so important to a child’s success as an informational reader and teachers and parents can use worksheets provided by TheWorksheets.com to support their growth in engaging with informational text.
Key Ideas and Details
When reading informational text, it is important that students learn to understand key ideas and details. With the prompting and support of a teacher or adult, students in kindergarten should be able to tell you the main topic of something that they are reading. You can prompt this by asking the student “What do you think this book was about?” Students can be prompted to pay attention to the title of the book. You can tell kindergarteners that this is a clue to what the book is going to be mostly about. Another clue you can hint to students is to pay attention to the photographs. You can explain that photographs often show what the text is explaining.
Students should also be able to retell the key details of a text. You can prompt this by asking “What did the book teach you about _____?” Students should be able to tell you some of the facts that the author revealed within the book. If a student could not retell you details on their own, the book may need to be reread. If you would like to advance your child/student, have them point in the book where they found that information. This can be referred to as text evidence and this concept will be advanced upon in the grades to come.
Students can also practice this skill through read-alouds. You can read a book to a child and have them try to answer key ideas and detail questions.
Another skill that they can work on is making connections between individuals, events, ideas, or pieces of information within a text. Students can be prompted by an adult. You can model this skill at first by verbally explaining connections as you read with your child. After time, you should be able to transfer the responsibility of explaining connections to your child through prompted questioning.
Below are many worksheets that could help your kindergartener understand key ideas and details:
Craft and Structure:
When reading informational text, students will come across many new words that are topic-specific. This type of reading requires skills for students to overcome these unfamiliar words. With prompting and support from a fluent reader or adult, students should be able to ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text. It is important that you teach your student/child skills to overcome these struggles.
One skill that you can teach your child is to read the words around the unknown word to see if the student can guess what the word would be based on the context of the sentence. You can use this same strategy with the use of the first letter sound of the unknown word if more assistance is needed.
Another skill that could be valuable to teach a kindergarten student is to use picture clues to help with those unknown words. In kindergarten level text, picture clues often reveal the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Aside from unfamiliar words, it is important that kindergarteners know the basics of an informational book. They do not need to know all of the nonfiction text features, they will learn those in future grades. It is important that a kindergartener knows where the front and back covers are and that they can point to the title and title page of a book. You could also start to point out where you can find the author and illustrator of a book. In kindergarten they should know the roles of an author and an illustrator and what they provide for the book.
Integration of Ideas and Knowledge:
Students in kindergarten need some prompting and support to connect ideas that they are learning within an informational text. You can help your student/child by asking them to describe the illustrations/photographs/other text features they may see in an informational text. They should be able to tell you what person, place, thing, or idea that the text feature depicts based off of the text in the book. You can verify their thoughts by pointing back and rereading the text on the given page to provide them with feedback on their thinking.
You can also help them to identify reasons that the author gives to support points in a text. In a kindergarten text, these points are often found on separate pages within a book. You can model this thinking with your child/student and eventually transfer the job to your child/student to explain.
The last helpful skill that kindergarten students can learn when engaging with informational text is to be able to identify the basic similarities and differences between two or more different texts that are on the same topic. Students can point out that the text features such as photographs and illustrations are different or similar. They can note that the descriptions used by the authors can also be different although both are factual.
These worksheets from TheWorksheets.com can help your child grow in the integration of ideas and knowledge:
Other Notes:
It is important that children in kindergarten are exposed to many different reading levels, text complexities, and topics. If children are reading at a lower reading level, you can support their reading by actively engaging them in read-alouds of books above their reading level to grow their vocabulary on a variety of different subjects as well as to use it as an opportunity to model different informational reading strategies. When children see a variety of reading levels/text complexities, they know that books are not always limited to a few words on a page and that more information can be revealed when more words are able to be read!
Conclusion
Information text helps our students and children understand the world around them. It is important for them to have the skills and strategies necessary to decipher the information in these sometimes challenging texts.
TheWorksheets.com is filled with many informational resources to each child grow as an informational reader!