Friday Flashback Linky: Informational-palooza!

Congrats to all of my winners so far!  There are still TWO great giveaways that you can enter that will be ending this weekend -

Day 6:  Purple Cow Laminator

Day 7:  FREE Unit from Teacher's Clubhouse & Lightbulb Minds

But now, it's time for...

This week in our classroom, my little MonSTARS have been busy, busy, busy creating their informational books.  If you'll recall, last week they read informational books on an animal of their choosing to become "experts" on the topic.  Here's where we are on this BIG project...

Students took their notecards (where each page would become a chapter) and ordered their notes (with numbers) in a logical sequence.  Then they began writing their chapters.  As notes were written, they were crossed out on the notecard.

 This is the first page of this student's chapter.  Each chapter had to have a title.  Each page must have a realistic illustration with a caption that matches the text on that page.

We were sure to cite our sources.  Each student used at least one book, as well as Discus, an amazing website for SC residents that has an animal kingdom section for kids that can read it to them which is awesome for those lower readers!

I do a "plagiarism" lesson to introduce works cited that teaches students that it's not okay to take others' work and claim it as your own.  I always hold up a beautiful piece of work from one student, "oh and ah" over it, and then give credit to the wrong student.  When the owner of the work tries to claim it, I tell them "no, this is _____'s work."  Before they get really upset, I let them in on this big word and what it means and then we talk about how they felt.  They really get it!

Students finished writing all of their chapters this week, so we created our Table of Contents for the books.  We practiced using Table of Contents a lot during this unit and students were quizzed on  using them - they ROCKED it!

Then we moved on to Glossaries.  Students had to read their own books and make a list of words from their book that they thought kindergarteners might not know. :)  Then they were to narrow their list to the 4 words that they thought were the most important ones.  They alphabetized these and created their own Glossaries for their books!

Coming up with their own definitions was the toughest part!  Even when you know what something is, it's hard to explain it!

We'll keep working on these books next week as we create diagrams, indexes, and covers!  We'll also begin creating PowerPoints about our animals to present to the class!

If you're interested in my Informational Resources, you can find them here.  My absolute favorite way to reinforce these text-features during this unit is by playing Around the World with my Non-Fiction Text Feature Cards...they won't let me forget to give them a shot at it each day! 

I have a lot to share with you from our persuasive writing unit, too, but I'll save that for next week.  Go ahead....link up so I can see what you've been doing this week!