A Place for Butterflies

​Melissa Stewart’s A Place for Butterflies and all of the other books in the same series are an integral part of my nonfiction unit. They’ve always been a powerful tool to highlight different text structures. The main text uses the cause and effect structure while the sidebars use the problem and solution text structure. This year I took it a step further, and I asked students to think about why Stewart chose these text structures. She could have chosen a chronological/sequential text structure or elected to write books about the physical features of butterflies or birds or turtles or frogs or bats, but she didn’t. Why? They knew the answer of course, because Stewart wanted text structures that showed readers that every action they take, be it from bringing cloth bags to the grocery stores or planting butterfly gardens, counts.