Text Features
Usually found at the top of the page or paragraph, usually printed in a larger or colored font, describes the topic or paragraph in a one- or two- word phrase.
Heading
Identifies key topics in the book and the order they are presented. Located in the front of the book.
Table of Contents
Stories that have a problem to solve. They often involve a detective following clues to solve the puzzle. 39 Clues
Mystery
Stories passed down orally from generation to generation. They often include talking animals, the number "3," but not usually magic: Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Folktales
A discussion or conversation between two or more characters. Uses quotation marks in print.
Dialogue
One or two sentences that describe an illustration or photograph, usually appears underneath the picture.
Caption
Lists names, places, and important topics from the book in alphabetical order and gives the page numbers associated with each topic. Helps quickly direct the reader to the information they're trying to find. Located in the back of the book.
Index
A fanciful story written about things that cannot really happen or people or creatures who do not exist. Traits may include: magic or magical creatures, superheroes, fables, folktales, etc. Harry Potter
Fantasy
Stories that have good and bad characters. strange creatures like witches and dragons, and often have magic: Cinderella
Fairy Tales
An incomplete sentence, lacking a subject or a verb or both.
Sentence Fragment
Often added to photographs or illustrations to give more information to the reader, sometimes gives names to the parts of the object in the photo/illustration.
Labels
A "mini-dictionary" found in the back of a book.
Glossary
Stories that are "recreated" about people, places, and problems of the past: I Survived books.
Historical Fiction
Stories that are thousands of years old, usually about gods and goddesses, how the world was created, and/or explain "why" something is the way it is. How Chipmunk got its Stripes, King Arthur, Zeus
Myths and/or Legends
A light, usually humorous poem with a regular rhythm, pattern, and rhyme scheme:
There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe.
He woke in a fright
In the mid of the night
And found it was perfectly true!
Limerick
The presentation of a chronological sequence of events along a drawn line that enables a viewer to understand events and their relationship.
Timeline
An introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author, found in the front of a book, sets a purpose for reading and gives an overview of the content.
Preface
Make-believe stories based on imagined futuristic technological advances. May include traits like robots, space travel, time travel, life on other planets, aliens, etc. A Wrinkle in Time, Star Wars
Science Fiction
Very short stories that teach a moral or a lesson at the end: Aesop wrote the most famous ones.
Fables
A book about a person written by that person.
Biography
A diagram in which the numerical values of items are represented by the height or length of lines or rectangles of equal width.
Bar graph
A type of graph in which a circle is divided into sectors that each represents a proportion of the whole.
Pie chart
Stories written about people, places, and the problems of today. Stories that could have actually occurred to people or animals in a believable setting. These stories resemble real life, and fictional characters within these stories react similarly to real people.
Realistic Fiction
Stories so full of exaggeration that the truth is stretched way out of shape. Early settlers in the U.S. created this genre for entertainment: Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Davy Crockett, etc.
Tall Tales
A person, place, event, or object that has a deeper meaning than its literal meaning.
Symbolism