Non-fiction has never been more interesting...

I wish I could remember how I learned stuff as a kid. I wish I could remember if my teachers got all freakishly excited about teaching different units looking more "enthused" about the material than their young audience. I wonder if they walked around with a clipboard, eager to jot down our responses to reading..."ooooh!" "Cool!" "No way!", and then couldn't wait to share them with us afterward. I wonder if reading time was "alive" in my classroom when I was first learning how to read. I hope that my students could say that it is in ours... We are currently in the midst of a non-fiction unit, both in reading and writing. We began with all of the conventions that help you read non-fiction (labels, table of contents, captions, close-ups, cutaways, etc.) and then moved on to taking those skills toward their own "research". They are all working hard at their own non-fiction book (about a topic of their choice). It is quite the task, but they are doing great!

As we learned each convention, the students kept their own "Conventions notebook" to find examples throughout real text. I had some special helpers draw our mini anchor charts for everyone to see.

The students were in full discovery mode as they continued to share "I found another comparison!" or "look at all these labels!" I thought I would just display them instead of closing their findings and shoving them back on the shelf.

Many times young kids (or all kids for that matter) struggle with non-fiction books because the text is too difficult. I decided to print off some tricky pieces of information from books in our classroom library and put them in our "Wait...what?" cup (that is usually the sound you make when you get to a tricky sentence).

The kids then turn "eye to eye and knee to knee" and share how they think they could make the sentence more simple. We bring all of our ideas together and come up with a better piece of information. This helps them to infer deeper meanings...and also take notes without copying straight from the text.

When we are reading non-fiction all together, I thought I would use the FQR chart (Fact, Question, and Response) that I have seen in some resource books. The kids have fun helping me by being the "note-taker" and records the students thoughts. Note to self: "Invisible" pens work great to have the other students occupied while the "note-taker" is writing. "We are all taking notes together!"