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! 

Kindness "Hot Seat"

We have been able to connect with lots of amazing classrooms thanks to The Global Kind Project. One of the classrooms we've connected with shared this amazing video they made of their "hot seat" kindness project, where one student sat in a chair facing away from the white board while everyone else in the class wrote something kind for them on the board:

We loved watching Ms. Hayes' class so much that we decided we wanted to try out this project in the giraffe class! Every day, we would put a few giraffes in the "hot seat" while the rest of us thought of kind messages to share with them on the board. Here are the results:

We put our experience together into a video, just like Ms. Hayes did with her students! We are going to share the video at the SMS MakerFest this Thursday (May 18th) and hopefully we can inspire some other classrooms to do this amazing project, too! If you can't make it to the MakerFest, you can check out our video right here:

Weird But True: 2R Edition!

We have all absolutely loved learning so many cool new facts during our nonfiction reading unit. We've learned how to best use nonfiction books to help us learn about new topics and build on the knowledge we already had. 

One of our favorite parts of this unit was working in our topic groups to build knowledge with one another! We found out so many interesting facts when we came together to talk about our books with our fellow group members

We've also been working hard to complete our nonfiction Expert Books during Writer's Workshop! Check out some of the pages from our amazing books:

To celebrate all of the learning that we've done, we created our own version of National Geographic Kid's Weird But True videos! You can check it out here:

Happy Reading, and Never Stop Exploring!