Nonfiction Text Features

We've been spending the week learning about text features of nonfiction books. This is coinciding PERFECTLY with writing "All About Books" ala Lucy Calkins.

We made this anchor chart...a great visual for the kiddos.

And today, the students dug deep into their own nonfiction books and looked for the specific features we've been learning this week.

To download, click the picture.

This and That in First Grade!

This post is going to be full of randomness!

Our author study for this month is David Shannon. We've been loving all of his books, especially the David books! The kids drew David. So cute, right?

During the Daily 5, we've been talking about how important it is to select books that are a good fit. We compared hard, easy and just right books to riding a bike. We also worked on retelling and what a good retelling sounds like. The retelling anchor chart I adapted from Hello Literacy.

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In math, we've been working on Tally marks! This little poem helps the littles SO MUCH when figuring out when to cross the 5th mark.

Finally, in Science we are learning about weather and the water cycle. We made these super cute rainbow-clouds to hang from the ceiling. They took all of 10 minutes to make and really brighten up the room! I found this water cycle song on proteacher.net. We sing this to the tune of She'll be Coming 'Round The Mountain.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Daily 5! How's it going?

Check this out!

We reached our goal of 20 minutes!! YAY! I love hearing comments from the kids like "WOW! That did not feel like 20 minutes!" or "I could have read a lot longer!"

We are also focusing a lot on schema this week. We made the following anchor chart...and this is terrible, but I can't for the life of me find the originator of the content of this chart. If it was you, please let me know and I'll give you credit! I just loved the wording!

I taught my students actions to go along with this chart....

"Good readers ACTIVATE (throw your hands in the air) their SCHEMA (put your hands on your head) to understand what they READ (open hands like a book). Our SCHEMA (put your hands on your head) GROWS (use arms to show expanding) and CHANGES (roll arms in a circle)."

I also made this poster that we will use all year. It's at the height where a student can stand under it. Before reading, I have a student stand under the poster and we write the schema they have about the book. AFTER reading, the same student goes up and we can see how their schema grows and changes!

I'm just LOVING the Daily 5 -- it's my favorite part of the day and the kids love it too!