Informational Books

It's nearly February!  Somehow, in all the excitement and busy-ness of the past few weeks, I never posted about our Writing Unit.  For the past couple of weeks, we have been working on writing Informational Books.  Last year when I taught this unit, I didn't love how it turned out.  We had the kiddos do "research" in nonfiction books to write their stories and we ended up with a lot of confusion and fair amount of plagiarism.  This  year, I really wanted to focus on the kiddos coming up with their own topics and use nonfiction books simply as mentor texts.

We began this unit by brainstorming about topics we know a lot about.  The kiddos came up with such great topics!  Some of their ideas included "soccer stadiums," "cats," "the Wii," and "bowling." After they had their ideas, we learned how to make a web for our topic.  The main topic went in the middle, and then the "sub-topics" went around the outside.  We discussed how all of the sub-topics would need to be connected to center topic.  We also talked a lot about how our informational books were going to teach other people, so we would need to make sure that we included the answers to questions that others might have about our subject.

Once we had our Pre-Writing done, the kiddos moved on to drafting.  I intentionally scheduled this Writing Unit to align with our Nonfiction Reading Unit so that we could have over-lapping mini-lessons.  For instance, in reading we talked about how the Table of Contents shows us the sub-topics covered in the book; then in writing, the kiddos drafted a Table of Contents for their own informational book.  We also looked at how pages were organized in nonfiction books and discovered that they often have "Interesting Facts" insets, "zoom-in" pictures, and labeled diagrams.  The kiddos tried to add many of these features into their own writing.

Finally, the kiddos spent the last week revising and editing their writing to include comparisons (such as "a soccer field is as long at 100 cobra snakes" or "when you do a cannonball, you will make a splash that will hurt will like a shot"), proper punctuation, and correct capitalization.  I pulled out the trusty "Features of Easy to Read Writing" Anchor Chart but addd the new punctuation and capitalization rules that we've learned (i.e. commas, colons, and capitalizing names of places).  

Tomorrow we are going to share our informational books with the other first grade classes.  In reading, we've been practicing reading like narrators (...post on this to come soon), so this will be a great opportunity to highlight our Jeff Corwin voices.