Independent Research

Yes, it's me again!  I am still alive, believe it or not.  This week I had one of those "Aha!" moments.  The kind where your lesson went so well that you can't believe you haven't been doing this ALL YEAR! I was really excited about how this turned out!

We have been doing individual research projects.  Have you ever heard of Pebblego?    Anyways, with Open House coming up, we decided that each 1st Grade classroom would research a differnt habitat and display our for our parents.  As soon as I heard that, I jumped all over the rainforest.  Not only is it my favorite habitat, but there are so many cool things you can do with it!  Who wouldn't be excited to decorate their hallway with all those cool animals?  

Jessica, one of my teammates, found this amazing Sticky Note Research template.  She also introduced me to Pebblego.  We took an ENTIRE day on laptops researching our own animals.  This was like heaven for my kids!  There were huge gasps when they found out we were going to be on the computer ALL DAY! Lucky us, the rainforest has EVERYTHING!  It has insects, gorillas, birds, wildcats, poison dart frogs, etc.. Once they picked their animal, they used the sticky note template and found all their answers.  Its designed for K-2 so it was at their reading level.  

Once they finished their research, they wrote it into a report.  Here is the kicker!  They literally had to copy their sticky notes in order and their writing flowed nicely!  The very first sticky said, "Attention Grabber".  Some of them wrote, "Have you ever been to the Rainforest?  If so, you may know that a _____ lives there!"  Then it led them into describing what it looked like, what it eats, etc...  There stories were AMAZING!   

Nonfiction Research Writing

In ELA this week, our focus is on research.  If you have read some of my previous blogs, I am really into Writer's Workshop lately.  This was really exciting for me because not only am I conducting a research project with my kiddos, but it helps them when they want to create nonfiction stories.  

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!