Text features really grab our attention—just like the Barbie graphic that National Geographic magazine used to illustrate recent trends in cosmetic surgery. But have your students mastered the Common Core standard of interpreting and utilizing text features as part of their reading comprehension strategies?

This stand-alone lesson lets you put all those old magazines you’ve been saving (or your parents or your students’ parents) to good use by offering real-world opportunities to recognize, analyze, and utilize text features. This lesson provides for guided and independent exploration of titles, subtitles, subheadings, sidebars, graphs, charts, pictures, captions, and more, and asking students to critically think about the purpose and use of these items, and how they can be utilized to increase reading comprehension. This is an increasingly important—and tested—benchmark in which students must be competent in today’s world of graphics-heavy mass and popular media.

This lesson would also be great for social studies teachers. Kill two birds with a single stone: develop content knowledge and promote skillful reading. Win-Win!