The role of informational text in primary-grade classrooms has been the subject of much discussion in recent years, and there is converging evidence that young school children have few opportunities to engage with this genre. The studies described here expand the research base to include preschool (Study 1) and home (Study 2) exposures to informational text as read-alouds. School data included 1,830 read-aloud titles from 1,144 teachers of preschool through third grade. Home data included 1,847 titles reported by the parents or other family members of 20 kindergartners over the course of a school year. The findings suggest that in both of these environments-school (including preschool) and home-children have far less exposure to informational text than narrative text. Further, a trend was revealed suggesting that boys may be read proportionately more informational texts in their homes than girls.

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Despite arguments for more fully including informational text in early childhood classrooms, research suggests that young children's exposure to the genre is quite limited. This article focuses on the informational books that children do encounter, specifically through read‐alouds, and describes the narrow focus of those books. Informational read‐alouds are overwhelmingly on topics of life science. The authors advocate for both increasing and broadening the informational books read aloud to young children and provide recommendations for ensuring productive read‐aloud experiences.

In this strategy, students individually select and record 10 important words on self‐adhesive notes as they read a text. Then students build a group bar graph displaying their choices, write a sentence that summarizes the content, and then respond to prompts that ask them to think about words in powerful ways. Several prompts are suggested, each emphasizing the meaning, manipulation, or application of selected words in various contexts. This strategy is based on principles of effective vocabulary instruction as it involves repeated exposure to words active engagement with words study of words with instructional potential This strategy fosters word knowledge as well as comprehension of text with its focus on word meanings and important ideas in text. This article is also the source for a Class Acts podcast. Download “Teaching key vocabulary” from http://www.reading.org/resources/podcasts/index.html

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