Teaching literature involves more than helping students understand what happens in a story. Students also need to understand the ideas, conflicts, and larger concepts that give a story meaning. Yet, sometimes they approach a text without the background knowledge or conceptual understanding needed to recognize what an author is exploring.
At the same time, finding meaningful nonfiction that actually connects to the literature students are reading can be a challenge. Too often, nonfiction practice becomes a separate activity: students read a passage, answer a few questions, and move on without making a meaningful connection to anything else they are learning.
That's the gap I wanted to address with the Now, Explore It!: Background Builder series.
The goal isn't simply to add another reading assignment. It's to use nonfiction intentionally to build background knowledge, strengthen reading skills, and help students develop a deeper understanding of literature.
Building Background Knowledge and Conceptual Understanding
A story may explore complex ideas such as obsession, fate, and identity. Students may understand the events of a story without fully understanding the larger ideas behind them.
Providing background knowledge and introducing these concepts through other examples gives students a foundation for deeper analysis.
For example, before or while studying a story about obsession, students might examine how fixation influences characters in several other literary works. They can explore how different characters become consumed by a desire, how their perceptions change, and how their choices affect themselves and others.
The same approach can help students understand symbolism. When studying The Jacket or The Scarlet Ibis, students benefit from exploring the larger ideas and associations connected to the objects that become symbolic in those stories. Background knowledge gives them more to draw upon as they consider why an author chooses a particular object and how its meaning develops.
When students encounter these concepts in their anchor text, they have more than a definition to work with. They have examples, comparisons, and a better understanding of how an idea can shape a character, influence events, and contribute to a story's theme.
Making Nonfiction Reading Meaningful
Students need regular opportunities to read nonfiction, but skill practice is more effective when it has a meaningful purpose.
The articles in this series are written to connect directly to the ideas explored in literature. Students aren't reading unrelated passages simply to practice identifying a central idea or answering multiple-choice questions. They're building knowledge that will help them understand and discuss another text.
As they read, students practice:
Identifying central ideas and supporting information
Making inferences and drawing conclusions
Interpreting vocabulary in context
Analyzing text features and organizational structures
Recognizing relationships between ideas
Examining how authors develop and support their points
The goal is to strengthen nonfiction reading skills while helping students recognize that reading different types of texts can contribute to a larger understanding.
Learning to Use Text Features to Build Meaning
Text features are an important part of nonfiction reading, but students sometimes overlook them or treat them as separate from the actual passage. In this series, visuals and text features are intentionally selected to add information, clarify concepts, and extend the discussion.
Students encounter features such as illustrations, maps, captions, sidebars, and diagrams. They must do more than identify these features; they have to interpret the information they provide and consider how it contributes to the article.
A map may help establish geographical or historical context. An illustration may help students visualize a person, event, or concept. A sidebar may introduce information that deepens their understanding of the topic. A diagram may help explain a process or relationship.
Students practice integrating information from the text and its accompanying features to develop a more complete understanding. This is an important skill because meaning is not always communicated through paragraphs alone.
Learning to Recognize How an Article Is Organized
Understanding nonfiction involves more than finding answers in a passage. Students need to recognize how information is organized and how specific details contribute to larger ideas.
The graphic organizers in this series help students move from specific examples to general supporting ideas and ultimately to the central idea of an article.
This process reinforces an important reading and thinking skill: recognizing the relationship between a main idea, the supporting points that develop it, and the specific evidence that illustrates those points.
It also provides a model students can apply to their own writing. They see how an author develops a larger idea through carefully selected examples rather than simply making a statement and moving on.
Connecting Ideas Across Texts
One of the most important goals of the series is to help students move beyond reading texts independently and begin making meaningful connections between them.
Students first examine a concept through nonfiction examples. Then they apply that understanding to a literary text.
This requires them to do more than identify a similarity. They must consider how the same concept operates in different situations, recognize parallels, and explain how an author develops an idea through a character's thoughts, decisions, and actions.
Students also practice supporting their thinking with evidence from multiple sources. They learn that a strong response doesn't simply state an opinion or identify a connection; it explains the relationship between the texts and supports that explanation with specific details.
Giving Students More to Contribute to Discussions
Meaningful class discussions depend on more than whether students have read the assigned story. Students also need ideas, examples, and background knowledge they can draw upon.
When students have explored a concept through several examples, they have more to contribute. They can compare characters, recognize similar conflicts, consider different outcomes, and use information from the nonfiction article to support their interpretations.
The additional examples give students something concrete to reference and help move discussions toward deeper analysis.
Reinforcing Skills for Standardized Testing
The series also provides purposeful practice with the types of reading skills students are expected to demonstrate on standardized assessments.
Students work with central ideas, supporting details, inference, vocabulary in context, author's craft, text structure, and text features. They practice interpreting information from visuals and integrating details from different parts of a passage.
The multiple-choice questions provide opportunities to apply these skills in a test-style format, while the graphic organizers and written responses take students beyond selecting an answer. They must explain their thinking, organize information, and support conclusions with evidence.
This combination helps students practice both recognizing the correct information and using it to develop a meaningful response.
A Consistent Routine for Reading, Thinking, and Writing
Each resource in the Now, Explore It! series follows a consistent instructional routine:
Explore It → Write It → Connect It
Explore It: Students read an original nonfiction article and answer questions that develop comprehension, analysis, vocabulary, and text-feature skills.
Write It: Students revisit the article, organize information, and develop a written response supported by specific evidence.
Connect It: Students apply what they have learned to a literary text, making connections and supporting their analysis with evidence from both sources.
The routine gives students repeated opportunities to practice important skills while working with different concepts and literary texts. As students become familiar with the process, they can focus more attention on the ideas they are exploring and the quality of their thinking.
More Than Another Reading Assignment
The purpose of the Now, Explore It! series is to make nonfiction reading an intentional part of literature instruction.By combining background knowledge, meaningful nonfiction, text-feature analysis, graphic organizers, writing practice, standardized-test skills, and text-to-text connections, students develop skills that work together rather than in isolation.
Because understanding a story means more than knowing what happened. It means understanding the ideas behind it—and recognizing how those ideas connect to the world beyond the page.
Current Now, Explore It! Background Builders
The Psychology of Obsession (“The Tell-Tale Heart”)
Fate and Free Will in Literature (“The Monkey’s Paw”)
The Growing Autonomy of Technology (“There Will Come Soft Rains”)
Survival in Numbers (“The Scarlet Ibis”)
Blues and Country Music (“The Treasure of Lemon Brown”)
The Power of the Jacket (Soto’s “The Jacket”)
The Rise of the Household Appliance (“Brave Little Toaster”)
Articles can be used with other reading texts or alone. Only the paired passage prompt is specifically geared toward the corresponding story. It can be adjusted for different texts.
