It's been nutty in the first grade halls recently, for we are in the middle of helping our students create their very own Non-Fiction books/reports! We knew going in it would be a long process, but I'm happy to report that we are half-way through and are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!
Before the teaching, we allowed our students to explore several non-fiction books and choose an animal that they were interested it. I found it so funny that more of my girls choose the scarier, creepier animals! Go figure! Then, they received their book and a print out from the Internet on their animal to use as their resources.
We then began teaching our students how to take notes. This was tricky in that we have spent so much time helping them create complete sentences and now they actually had permission to only write a word or two! :)
We taught them two write the note on the front and the resource on the back!
The next step was to allow them time to take 4 categories of notes: What it looks like, what it eats, where it lives, and interesting facts! I was impressed by the fact that they only had to research 2 facts per category, but many students wanted to keep finding more!
When the notes were completed, we began the daunting task of helping our students take their notes and transform them into a paragraph/chapter. A shout out to Ms. Breslin for creating a fantastic visual to help!
After modeling this once, the students took off! We have completed our first two chapters and this week we are finishing the last two and creating our table of contents! I forgot to get pictures of a completed paragraph, but here was one in progress.
We also took a writing break to allow our students to create their rough draft title page. They were so cute and creative. **I threw in a little lesson on alliteration and they ate it up!**
After the students finish all of the parts, they will submit the rough draft to us to be approved for publishing! Hopefully we will reach that point by the end of the week! Our plan is to present these right before spring break and help each child with a Power Point on their animal. Whew!...It can be done! :)))
On a different note, while at a conference last month I came across a book that I knew I wanted to share with my students! It's called The Juice Box Bully and y'all, every student could connect with some part of this book!
We read the book and discussed the meaning of a "bystander" and whether it was a positive or a negative type of person to be. We then created a new class promise with positive action words. I also let the students use water color paints to interpret their new promise! It was precious.
What a great way to keep the positivity going and enforce what we have learned about leadership and the 7 Habits! I encourage you to check it out!
Well, that's all for now! Have a wonderful weekend!
--Mrs. Hunter
No comments:
Post a Comment