More on Nonfiction Texts

On Tuesday, we discussed making predictions in nonfiction text. The students created the first half of a t-chart, working in pairs, and wrote down some of their predictions based off of the pictures in a nonfiction text. On Wednesday, they worked together to confirm their predictions. We talked about how to read the text to see if your prediction was right. Students finished off their t-chart by writing the facts they learned next to each of their predictions. Everyone was surprised to see that some of their predictions were spot on, and some of them were great ideas but still were not exactly what the page was telling them about.

On Thursday, we talked about what happens in your brain when you learn something new. We read a nonfiction book about giraffes and we made a list of all the things our brain told us when we heard something that was new and interesting:

Everyone got REALLY into this activity! When they heard new information eveyone was calling out "wow! amazing! gross! oh my gosh!" etc to show what their brain was thinking.

To finish off the week we talked about how to use sticky notes to document your new learning. We discussed the importance of this and everyone realized that it would be much easier to remember the things you learn if you use a sticky note to mark it than to have to go back and read the whole book again to find the information. Students worked in pairs again to read a nonfiction text and each group used sticky notes to document their new learning. At the end of the morning everyone got a chance to share one interesting fact they learned by using their sticky notes.

Next week we are going to be taking a close look at the different text features found in nonfiction books.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!