Text structures help you pay attention to books in a different way. Natalie Louis, one of my section leaders at the TCRWP Reading Institute, spent a lot of time teaching us that understanding nonfiction text structures can help kids to organize their thinking about their reading.
The seven text structures that entire books, chapters, or sections of books can have are:
1). Question/Answer
2). Lists
3). Categories
4). Problem/Solution
5). Process
6). Cause & Effect
7). Compare & Contrast
As a result of today’s session, I’m going to start paying greater attention to the text structures of the nonfiction books I buy and read aloud to Isabelle. I know that many of the nonfiction board books we have in our home are question/answer and list types of books. I’m now going to be more intentional about looking for a greater variety of text structures when I seek out nonfiction books for our home.
Raising Literate Humans 
This timely post is helpful as we are looking for more nonfiction books to add to our home library. Evaluating our choices will be easier with this list. Thank you for sharing this information!
Stacey,
Knowing the text structures could be a teaching point for the classroom! Our district has purchased non-fiction research labs based around themes like bugs, weather, planets, colonial America, sports, communities, (to name a few examples). As a result of knowing these text structures, the students could work on identifying what structure the books falls under as they are read. Thank you for sharing this list!
Amy
Thanks for the point of the explicit teaching points needed, Stacey. I wonder if individuals naturally lean toward text structure favorites, thus doing well in reading those, but less so with others? Thus, as you’ve said, variety is one key.