Five For Friday: More Nonfiction!

We survived another week! Third trimester is no joke and I spend life feeling tired! ;) But I'm letting my dishes sit for another day and putting my feet up instead. And actually writing on this blog. It's a mini miracle! 

I used up a bunch of old broken crayons to make some fun Lego crayons for all of our valentines treats! I got the molds from Amazon. Alex was great at helping take off the crayon paper and he loved sorting the colors and adding them to the molds!  I was happy to find a non-food treat because we have some food allergies in our class!

Monday was the most gorgeous 70s day! It was a great way to start February! It's fun to be able to meet up with friends too. A couple of the other teachers from my school have kiddos my kids ages so they have fun playing together and it's a refreshing mommy break!

Back at school we are busy researching information about our nonfiction topics! After learning about several different graphic organizers, we used those to help organize our notes. The kids are working on a final copy at home, but then we will also collaborate together to turn it into a class encyclopedia!

We have also been looking at different nonfiction text structures over the last couple of weeks! Reading A to Z has some great reading passages! I enlarged one for us to look at together and then the kids worked in pairs to pull out information and put it on an organizer! Looking at these texts have reinforced keeping our writing organized too!

Do you all use oils? They are a recent discovery for me, but I love them! the boys and I had fun making some stuff with them today! Alex is a huge fan! He loves sleepy spray for his bed and thinks it's amazing that we can make soap and hand sanitizer! 😉

Click on the picture to head over to Kacey's blog and see what other teachers are up to!

Organizing Our Text

We worked on sequencing this week. We brainstormed how we could use it in informational text. Structures like life cycles, how to books, and biographies fit perfectly with a sequencing organizer! Then the kids got to work.  I had fun walking around seeing the variety of topics that were out there! 

Life cycles of frogs, butterflies. How to ride dirt bikes, make paper airplanes, dress like Hermione, draw the superman symbol... the list goes on! Can't wait to read the final products!

Reading and Writing Informational Text

When my announcement that we were going to be focusing on Nonfiction/Informational Text in our reading and writing these next several weeks, was met with some loud groans, I have to admit I might have smiled to myself and been secretly thrilled with the challenge of turning my third graders into lovers of all things nonfiction. 

*Disclaimer: I will most undoubtably interchange the words informational text and nonfiction ALL. THE. TIME. but I think you all know what I mean! ;)

I had only lugged 40+ books to school on Tuesday to help introduce my kiddos to the wonderful world of nonfiction. I had spent 3+ hours planning out my reading and writing units over break so that I know exactly where we are headed these next 6-7 weeks and I am very excited. As I sat planning I was very thankful for the freedom I have in planning these units and for the depth I can go into with third graders. I have always loved teaching writing, but its always been a struggle. I have to say that teaching the 6 traits has been one of the best things to help me grow as a writing teacher. I wish I had moved through them with my 1st graders before. There is so much freedom within the 6 traits, but it has been the structure I have needed to help my kids move ahead as writers! 

We started out on a text feature scavenger hunt. This served as a great pre-assessment for me to see what the kids knew about nonfiction. They each had their own book and I called out 6 text features we were going to be covering in our iBooks that day, one at a time, and we searched for them in the book we had. After we found them we talked about the purpose of each text feature. The more the kids browsed the books the more interested they became in the books they held in their hands. Before break I had asked them to write down some topics they wanted to learn more about. So all the books I chose out of the library were ones I knew they would be interested in! ;)

When we settled down later that morning for independent reading, I introduced my kiddos to their bag of books. I had missed using bags of books (read more about them here) and with the direction we were moving in with this unit, I knew it we needed to start using them again. For the first time they chose 3 books and I added in some post it notes for later one when we start recording more of our thinking. Most kids had one or two nonfiction books in their bags. 

I love Independent Reading. These kids just get it.

What I loved the most about Tuesday was noticing that the kids automatically sat next to other kids that were reading on the same topic. The book talk I heard was fabulous! They would whisper new things they learned to each other. Throughout several conferences I noticed that a couple of the kids were doing a first read of the captions and other text features. We discussed that later on too that we don't have to read all of the text, which can be the nice thing about nonfiction! 

I am so excited for where we will go in the next couple weeks. Be sure to check back weekly for more updates!