Nonfiction Celebrations

Over the last two months, the giraffes have been reading and writing all sorts of nonfiction books! We learned that the purpose of a nonfiction book is to teach us true facts. Some fiction books can have true facts in them, but ALL the facts in a nonfiction book are true. 

While reading nonfiction books, we learned the lingo behind different topics, wrote down facts we learned and added to those facts by reading multiple books about the same topic. We also asked and researched questions about our different topics to learn more! After finding many facts, we chose our most interesting ones to share in our very own Weird But True video:

The first nonfiction books we created were our Who Am I? booklets. Each giraffe chose an animal to research, and painted a close-up of that animal's skin, a close-up of their eye, and then a full picture of the animal. The first two pictures were accompanied by 6 clues about that animal to help the reader guess which animal it was, and finally the full animal picture was accompanied by an acrostic poem about the animal. 

Can you guess what these animals are based on their eyes and their clues??

Answer: Elephant

Answer: Cat

Answer: Rattlesnake

After doing our animal research, we used our knowledge about nonfiction text features to create our Expert Project books! We wrote about topics that we already knew a lot about, such as dogs, cats, girl scouts, gymnastics, karate, The White Mountains, along with many others! Our books had everything from maps, diagrams, a table of contents, glossaries,  and even how-to guides! 

We all got to check out everyone's amazing books before our gingerbread decorating party and compliment them on our favorite parts! 

We can't wait to share our books with our families and learn more awesome facts from nonfiction books! 

Giraffes Giraffes Giraffes!

We've spent a lot of time over the first few days of school learning about our classroom mascot. We learned that a group of giraffes is called a "tower" and they live in the grasslands and woodlands of Africa. We looked at pictures of giraffes and the beautiful sunsets they have in the grasslands, and we recreated these giraffe silhouettes using black crayons and watercolors!

As we learn more facts about giraffes, we will write them on index cards and put them around our "tower"

We also did a directed drawing picture of a giraffe:

After we painted and cut out our giraffes, we created a special background using Adinkra Symbols, which are used in all sorts of African fabrics and pottery. 

We watched clips from this video and chose some of our favorite symbols to add to our background. Our giraffes looked amazing and are now hanging proudly in the hallway:

Finally, at the end of our first week together, we worked as a group to create a unifix cube train as long as a male, female, and baby giraffe!

We learned male giraffes can grow up to 18 feet tall and females grow up to 16 ft. When giraffes are born they are already 6 feet tall! Their tongues are also up to two feet long and are black/purple in color. 

We will continue to learn more about our mascot throughout the next few days and throughout the school year. If anyone finds and fun giraffe facts at home, please share them with us!