Nonfiction Text Feature Surgery

Have you ever wanted to try a classroom transformation but just didn’t have the time or energy to make it happen? That’s how we felt! When we first saw the idea of a text feature surgery, it actually looked like something we could handle. Throw down some blue butcher paper, add in a heart beat monitor video from YouTube, grab some medical gloves and a face mask and your class can experience this engaging activity too!

Prepare for Surgery

Before we allowed our students to perform surgery, we treated them as “Surgical Residents” and had them go through Medical School. We spent a day or two learning about non-fiction text features, why they’re important, how they help us as we’re reading, and becoming experts on all things text features.

We used this text feature chart with interactive notes to help us. We also played a matching text feature game to practice.

Grab the vocabulary cards for the matching game for FREE by clicking below!

Surgery Day

When we felt confident that our little residents understood the text features they would be using, it was time for surgery! We set up the classroom before students arrived so they would be excited from the moment they came in the door. It also helped us get through the morning routine quickly because they were so excited to start surgery.

The setup was so easy! We simply covered the tables with blue butcher paper and stuck their gloves, face masks and wipes (for sanitizing their surgical tools) in a basket in the middle of the table. We also made sure that we had a StoryWorks magazine and surgery packet ready for every student. YouTube has lots of videos with heart rate monitors to add another realistic touch!

We made a checklist of the steps our doctors needed to follow to perform their transplants so they knew exactly what to do. Of course, this started with cleaning/sanitizing their tools and reading the patient charts.

Each patient had a list of symptoms and students had to decide which text feature would help them based on their symptoms. Then they had to find an example of that text feature in their magazine, cut it out, and glue it in their patient’s file.

We designed our surgery like this because we felt it was more rigorous and required deeper thinking skills then just simply asking students to find a specific text feature and cut it out.

Post-op Reports

When they finished all 8 patients, we asked our surgeons to fill out their post-op reports on each patient. They identified the text feature transplant that they performed, the text features purpose, and how it would help their patient as they’re reading.

Our students LOVED this activity and we loved how it helped them have a deep understanding of text features. If you are ready to try this out in your own classroom, click on the picture below to use our Text Feature Surgery product!