Knowledgeable about Non Fiction!

Thanksgiving break is SO close (we have school Mon & Tues next week), but my little friends have been busy working in our classroom still! I’ve been doing a ton of activities to help my students tackle non fiction texts due to the increased need for this with Common Core. Take a peek at what we’ve been up to in the world of non fiction.

1. I waited a good long while to really dive into non fiction where I was actually explicitly using it to teach because I wanted my little friends to get a firm grasp on reading in general before really analyzing what we were reading. To introduce non fiction, I just grabbed a few books that we had been reading and used them to discuss the differences between the two types of books. I then had my students explore the non fiction text themselves.

2. We then moved on to actually sorting the books by type: fiction or non fiction. This is a great activity that I will be repeating again soon because it is quick and meaningful!

3. One thing I’ve been loving about non fiction is that I can expose my struggling readers to some on level text and get them to interact with such text with my assistance.  We have been busy learning lots about non fiction:

4. After going over non fiction text features, we added post it labels to non fiction books, identifying the features with actual text. We did this together first, using the posters as our reference guide. My students seem to love everything about non fiction text features now!

 After doing this together, my students got their own non fiction text and filled out a graphic organizer identifying where each feature was located in their book.

You can check out all these and a ton more in my Knowledgeable about Non Fiction pack here! (The entire pack is aligned to all K/1 CCSS for Informational Text.)

5. Freebie time! I wanted my students to keep a log of books they’ve been reading in our room, so I created this book log as a way to track fiction and non fiction books. My students are adding their titles of their non fiction and fiction books to this log and then after they have a few listed, they choose one title from each side (fiction/non fiction) and explain why they would recommend the book to someone else.

My one issue with this is that it is VERY time consuming for my little friends to even just copy the title of a book, so for my Kinder-friends, I resorted to writing the titles for them to save some of our precious time together! I hope as they continue to advance throughout the year the process will take less time. You can grab this freebie here!

Oh and one more thing….it was our blogiversary this week (yay!!!)- so please come back on Sunday to check out our amazing giveaway!

Thanks TBA and Doodlebugs for hosting, as always!