Traveling Through Tales

In honor of the Fairy Tale Wax Museum, we recently began reading the book The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer. This story is about twins who discover a fairy tale world through a magic portal in a book given to them by their grandmother. We've been LOVING this book so far, and to celebrate our love of this story we re-created the map of The Land of Stories! 

Each of us worked together to re-create each of the kingdoms and landmarks in The Land of Stories and added them to our big map

Now that our map is complete, we will be tracking Alex and Connor's adventures as they travel through each of the kingdoms, meeting many of our favorite fairy tale characters along the way!

Diving into Non-Fiction

This month during Reader's Workshop, we will be focusing non-fiction texts. We spent a lot of time this week exploring the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts, and in doing so we also discovered some of the features of non-fiction texts.

On Tuesday, we worked together with our table mates and sorted the books in our thematic book bins into two piles: fiction and non-fiction.

Some books were hard to categorize, because while they were definitely fictional, they still provided us with some true facts. While we know there is no such thing as the Magic School Bus and we know the states cannot sing in a talent show like they do in The Scrambled States of America Talent Show, both books taught us some real facts about science, geography, and U.S. history! 

On Wednesday and throughout the rest of the week, we discovered Non-Fiction Text Features in our books. We first worked with our reading partners to look for these features in our books, and later in the week we searched for them on our own after choosing non-fiction books for our book bins and used these features to help us find new facts in our texts. 

Here are some of the features we've found:

Diagrams

We even found some diagrams outside of our non-fiction books!! 

Glossary

Index

Bold Words

Table of Contents

Captions

Maps

We discovered that not all non-fiction books include all of these features, but many of them include several! We have found them very helpful when trying to find new information. We have already learned lots of awesome new facts about so many interesting things, we can't wait to learn more!