Non Fiction Text Features

I'm super excited to share a sequence of lessons that I co-taught with our amazing reading teacher at my school! We were working on nonfiction text features...

We called each of the lessons a "mission" so here's Mission 1...

The kiddos were read the Mission 1 sheet that is in my TPT product (click product image above). It basically told the kiddos that they would work in groups to go on a scavenger hunt and create a nonfiction text feature poster.

We had 5 groups of 3-4 kiddos and myself and our reading teacher walked around, talking to the kiddos about what they were noticing.

Some of the kiddos were super insightful saying they found lots of headings because there were so many different articles or that they noticed that almost all the photographs had captions. There was also a lot of discussion about the nonfiction text features they couldn't find and why.

They loved the freedom they were given to explore nonfiction text features. Their finished products were pretty great too!

Mission 2

For mission 2, we gave the kiddos 1-page articles with all the nonfiction text features blocked out. I used Times for Kids articles, but you could use anything that is short. You could even retype the article if that was easier.

The kiddos' job was to figure out what they thought was missing which led to a discussion about WHY they thought these text features would be important.
After this mission we had a class discussion about how each of the text features would help the reader and I revealed the original articles to the pairs.

Mission 3

For our last mission, which I used as an activity AND an assessment for nonfiction text features, consisted of kiddos looking for nonfiction text features and explaining why they are important. Each kiddo picked out a nonfiction text, and recorded 4 nonfiction text features they found and why that text feature was important.

Students then paired off and shared what they thought about the nonfiction text features. I loved how when they got to the sharing part that many of the groups actually went into the text to talk about the text features they chose.

The kiddos had a lot of fun with these "missions" and it really helped them to learn the nonfiction text features. The only other suggestion I have that I think helped the kiddos a lot is that I've had them give me a thumbs up during every nonfiction read aloud when they saw a nonfiction text feature. I would stop after every page or so and call on a student with their thumbs up and ask him or her to explain how that text feature helped us as readers.

I hope you can use one or more of these ideas to teach nonfiction text features in your classroom!

Hello New Year!

Well I haven't blogged since before our winter break... but I'm back! Anddd linking up a day late to Doodlebugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

New Year's Resolution time... My teaching resolution is to work even harder to get Whole Brain Teaching techniques into every lesson and into our day more often. This means... more gestures, more use of the scoreboard, more references to our rules & more consistent use of the Super Improver Wall. If you want to know about any of those wonderful WBT goodies, check out my WBT tab & hop into a WBT Wednesday (which I PROMISE I will get back into!!! especially now that I "met" fellow WBTer Heidi over at Droppin' Knowledge who also does a WBT Wednesday.

I'm so excited to be working with one of our amazing reading consultants & my fabulous teammates & one of our special education teachers to start a new fluency block during our week. We sorted our second graders into types of readers and are each taking a group of 10 or less kiddos and teaching fluency geared at the types of reader we have.

Our reading consultant introduced this awesome fluency book that is really guiding us through this process. Right now we are meeting 2x a week for 15 minutes and will reassess in 6 weeks to see how much our students' fluency has improved.

I've had the somewhat bad habit of coming up with math games on the fly lately... but this one was a hit for working with double digit subtraction WITHOUT regrouping. Grab it for free...

To play, just have your kiddos roll a dice 3 times (I had them roll a double dice and a 12 sided dice - 10, 11, 12 kiddos picked any number). They fill in the boxes with the numbers they rolled, being sure they create a larger number on top.

I also created this one this week to practice counting back by 10's before we delved too deeply into double digit subtraction. It was a nice little refresher on Monday to get back into school mode.

This was a little less "last minute" and even has directions right on the top of the page for ya ;)

We've been working hard on nonfiction text features. The kiddos loved this super simple activity this week. We had a shortened amount of time due to our new fluency rotations so I gave each partnership a nonfiction book about animals (National Geographics for Kids series) and 4 pieces of highlighting tape. Their job was to try to find a heading, a caption, a map and a label and they only had 5 minutes to do it. They did SUCH a great job. Every group whose book had all 4 of these features found them. A few of the books didn't have maps, but those groups found the other 3 without a problem :)

 

And finally, I just can't help but share the AWESOME gift my students' families got for me... talk about the coolest teacher chair ever!!! I am so lucky for the group of families I have this year!


I hope you all had a great holiday and are starting the New Year off right!

Update & Book Talk Tuesday

So excited to link up with Mrs. Jump again for Book Talk Tuesday!

But before I get started... 2 quick updates...

#1 If you didn't check out Whole Brain Wednesday last week, go check it out here... part 2 of *gasp* losing the clip chart! Trust me, this was SUCH a hard thing for me to do, but I can't wait to see the positive effect in my room this year *fingers crossed*

#2 I am SO excited to have finished my [first 10 weeks of second grade] Morning Work Journal. Now that I have the format, the rest of the year will be following closely behind as well as a 1st grade version!
The journal includes number sense, editing, parts of speech & more! It can also be used in 1st and 3rd grade classrooms depending on your level of students. I'll talk more about my love/hate relationship with morning work on Five for Friday this week, in case you're interested!

It's discounted this week $7... $5!, so go check it out and be on the look out for the rest of the year & a year-long bundle!

Now onto Book Talk Tuesday... This week I've decided to share How a House is Built by Gail Gibbons.

I will admit this was not my favorite book to read aloud, however it is a part of our Gail Gibbons author study for nonfiction writing and I was BEYOND pleasantly surprised at the student writing that exploded after reading this together.

If you haven't read any Gail Gibbons books before she has LOADS of nonfiction books that are illustrated. For this reason, her books are great mentor texts to model how students can write and illustrate nonfiction pieces rather than thinking they need to use photographs as is the case in most nonfiction books.

How a House is Built goes through the steps that various workers take in order to build a house from the ground up. It is very informative and a few of my kiddos were excited because they had recently had a house built and they remembered the names of some of the contractors.

Reading Level: DRA 24
                         Guided Reading: M
                         Lexile: 570L

Resources:

Web Resources:

•  Meet the Author: Reading Rockets interview with Gail Gibbons
• Monthly Lessons: This resources doesn't have this book specifically but it has 12 other Gail Gibbons books with great lesson ideas/activities.
• More activities: This resources also does not reference this book specifically but it has many other Gail Gibbons books with great lesson ideas/activities.
• How to build a house: This lesson focuses on students understanding the process of building a house and uses How a House is Built within the lesson plan.

Vocabulary: There are TONS of vocabulary words to choose from such as surveyor, operators, carpenter, etc. I would suggest pre-reading and choosing 5-10 words to focus on since this book is very content-heavy.

Activities:
Before Reading: Create a KWL and have students identify what they know and want to learn about houses being built. Students can create their own like the one I created below, click for a copy.

During Reading: Have students identify nonfiction text features while you read aloud. Ask them what they notice about these text features compared to within a typical nonfiction text. Talk about how a book can be nonfiction even if it does not have real photographs. Nonfiction texts always having photographs is a common misconception students have about nonfiction.

After Reading: Have students write their own "how to" piece. To differentiate for different levels of writers, have students choose how many steps their piece will have by cutting out the procedure/order words from the below worksheet, pasting them down, then writing out the step. This allows for lower students to write a piece with simply first, next, then and last while high flyers can use words multiple times in addition to words such as after that, later, second, third, etc. Students can then rewrite or type their piece to publish it.

I hope you consider using this book and other Gail Gibbons books to spark students into writing nonfiction pieces. This particular book make my kiddos write really great How To pieces. I helped with the "research" part, finding loads of nonfiction texts on the topics they requested but they did the reading, organizing and writing... it was very impressive for my 2nd graders :)

Feeling the Stress of the New Year!

It's been a while since I posted. I started a new grad class the first week of the year, and am feeling the stress. My past 2 classes have really integrated our classroom into our work, so it didn't feel like we were doing a ton of "extra work" or it felt like it was benefiting our kiddos so much that the extra work was okay! This class is called "Educational Issues: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives." That being said, it's a lot more about becoming aware of and learning educational issues that affect us as teachers and gaining a better understanding and perspective on them. Well this is all well and good, but the assignment load is feeling unbearable.


The good news is my big research paper and presentation will be on Whole Brain Teaching, so hopefully that means a few WBT posts in the next 8 weeks!

Before I show you what's been happening in my room, here's a great project I took on the day before we went back to school after break. It was super easy, all you need is a glass jar (I re-purposed a pasta sauce jar), stickers and mod podge and if you want to paint the lid, I used acrylics. Oh, and a small notepad to tie to the jar or just have available near the jar. The purpose of the jar is to put happy memories in it during the year so at the end of the year you can open up the jar and read all the happy things that happened over the year :)

Alrighty, here's some of what we've been up to since the new year in my room...

We had one awkward day back (Thursday) pretty much knowing we'd have a snow day on Friday, so we did a lot of New Year themed things. Resolutions was our #1 project for the day...

Each kiddo shared with the group what their "classroom" resolution was. They they could take that resolution (or choose a different one) and tell what they could do to reach their goal...

We also started a non-fiction unit... so we made an anchor chart for text features.

When making the anchor chart we tried to focus on how the features help the reader rather than a "definition" for each. This proved to be a little difficult for some of the text features!

In the theme of non-fiction we've been doing a lot of animal "research" which the kiddos have LOVED. Here is a simple Can/Have/Are activity we did...

The next few are a mini frog and bat research project where the kiddos worked with a partner doing a KWL then doing "research" on frogs/bats by reading a grade level nonfiction text on bats. I plan on posting these in a "mini unit" on TPT soon so be on the lookout!

 

 

I differentiated these "by hand" writing in some "hints" for my struggling kiddos and questions like "why did you choose this fact/why is it important" for my high flyers.

Our next step is to read about birds and use our bat research to compare and contrast birds and bats. These will also be included in my upcoming TPT product. Currently I have 2 "levels" with more or less difficult vocabulary.

 

 Hope you enjoyed the catch up... hopefully I will post before the end of my 8-week class!

Here's a little puppy love to leave you with...