I started the unit by letting them know we were going to create a nonfiction book as a class. In order to write a nonfiction story, we need to learn how writers go about doing so. I told them they first have to figure out what they want to write about! (I always tell them, a huge thing for writer's is that they need to be interested in what they are writing, or it will just turn out to be boring!)
I made an anchor chart for the steps in the writing process. It read: Choose a Topic, Thinking Map, Research, Write Story, Table of Contents, and Glossary. Once we completed a task, we crossed it off the list.
Step 1: Choose a Topic (here are the topics my friends picked)
We voted on Dolphins!
Step 2: Thinking Map- I asked them what important information we wanted to find out about dolphins for our nonfiction book.
Step 3: Research-We read several dolphin books and watched a video about dolphins... every time we learned a fact that we wanted to know, we wrote it on our thinking map in blue.
Step 4:Write/Illustrate
Step: 5-Table of Contents
I spread out all of our pages and had my students rearrange them in a logical order. Once we did that, we numbered our pages and created our Table of Contents.
Step 6: Glossary- We went through and found all of our underlined words and defined them.
Tomorrow, we are creating the back cover to be "About the Authors". Then I will cut the top and laminate the book. I figure since I can't put their pictures on my blog, I might as well go ahead and post this without that page.
Next week, they are doing individual research with a partner! I am so excited, I'll post some samples!
