Text Structures in the Outback

We are gearing up for our Family Reading Night. Our school hosts two Family Reading Nights each year. Our reading night attempts have gone through many different changes over the past few years. Our first one started out as just an opportunity for parents to come and read together. We had brought in pillow, couches, comfy chairs, rugs, etc into our multipurpose room and just let families spread out and read. It went well, but was lacking what we really wanted to achieve - a chance for parents to see what their kids are doing in reading class.
We have continued to evolve since that point and are going through with our latest attempt this week. This Family Reading Night will be a themed "Travel Around the World" for families. Each grade level is a continent and will be hosting reading activities that pertain to their respective continents. Reading classrooms have spent some time reading and researching about their appointed continent.
Some reading groups have volunteered to host special projects or presentations for families as well such as reader's theater, living museum, games, etc. Each classroom was expected to have something to display for parents to see.
Fortunately, for my 5th graders, we were assigned the continent of Australia. G'Day Mates! Since we have been working with text structures in our reading group, the thought came to mind to have my readers research an Australian topic and publish their findings using a specific text structure. Identifying text structures has been a very difficult standard for us to master this year, and my feeling was that perhaps it might be easier to identify if they actually had to write something following a certain text structure format.
Having a higher level group of readers, this presented quite a challenge for them. I gave each pair of students a text structure to work with. The hard part for them, was to think of a topic that would be appropriate for their assigned text structure (they found sequence to be the hardest).
I provided students with what we call our Text Structure Frame to give them some sort of direction to put their thoughts together. I was actually impressed with some of the topics that the students chose to write their papers about. The topics ranged from comparing Dingos and Wolves and the steps to throwing a boomerang to the effects of feral cats on Australian wildlife and the environmental threats to the Great Barrier Reef.
Our great text structure passages will be displayed proudly around some Australian wildlife in the hallway. Cheerio, Toodle-oo, and Hooroo for now!
By the way, our classroom is hosting a blogging activity with families. The blog we are creating can be found here:  http://kidblog.org/FamilyReadingNight/ if you'd like to visit.

Text Structure Frames