Teaching Literary Genres

I think teaching literary genres can be really fun, but difficult at times. Thank goodness for Pinterest, bloggers, and the other resources on the internet to give me amazing resources to teach the topic. Check out this website for great PDF versions of a few genre posters.

I start of teaching each genre in isolation, as each grade learns a few new genres as each year progresses. You can find amazing videos and teaching chart examples to teaching the units. As for my anchor charts, I like to make 1 chart per genre. I know what you're thinking: "Where do you put them all?!" When I am done teaching all of the genres, I do a review week where students have to start figuring out the differences and identifying them in a larger context. At the beginning of that week, I'll make one anchor chart to keep up for the remainder of the year that has all of the genres and just a short definition/characteristics so students can use it to reference later on.

This past year when I taught 3rd grade, I had students begin the "Traveling Through the Book Genres" packet where they are to read many different books to identify that book on the correct genre page. I had students fill out that particular genre page throughout the week we studied that genre. During our review week, they tied up any lose ends and compared/contrasted two of the genres we studied. My students did a really good job!

 

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Good luck teaching this unit and have fun! There are some amazing books out there! Look for a post soon for some read alouds for each of these genres!