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! 

Diving Into Nonfiction

On Monday, we "read the room" to figure out what our new focus in Reader's Workshop would be. We noticed that there were now lots of stories about animals, science, social studies, and important people on display and we noticed a new anchor chart about growing our knowledge, so we inferred that we would be learning all about nonfiction books!

To remind ourselves of the differences between fiction and nonfiction, we worked together with our table mates to sort out some of the books in our leveled library. Afterwards, we each picked one of the nonfiction books and shared with the class what made that book nonfiction. We noticed nonfiction books always have true facts and often times have real pictures, a table of contents, a glossary, captions, diagrams, labels, maps, and an index. 

We also began working on keeping track of the facts we've learned on sticky notes and also writing down how we felt about the fact. Some were interesting and shocking, while others were exciting and even a little scary!We've been working hard to keep track of our thinking so we can share all of our facts with our new reading partners during partner reading! 

2R Publishing House

We have been working incredibly hard for the last several weeks on our Expert Projects. We each got to choose a topic to write about that we felt we were experts and we created and published nonfiction books about our topics. We wrote about everything from cats to space, and cape cod to video games. All of our books included a table of contents, introduction, glossary, and an all about the author page, but the other pages in our books were completely unique to our topic. Some of us wrote how-to pages that went along with our topics, while others wrote informational and persuasive pages on the people, places, and things we decided to write about. When we were all done with our books, Mrs. Pitcher kindly bound them together so we could have a true published piece. Once all of the books were ready to go, we traveled around our classroom to write compliments and praise on sticky notes to attach to our friends' work. 

We loved being able to learn about so many different topics from our friends! These books are truly extraordinary and everyone should feel very proud of all of their hard work that went into making them.