I took a course last year (along with many teachers in our district) called Reading, Writing, and Research for All. The premise was that even very young students should have age-appropriate experience with researching a topic, getting to know it well, and writing about it to teach others (which is informational writing). We all know that we can't write about something unless we know it really well.
For the last few weeks we have been engaged in a project that goes along with our science and literacy standards. We started with a class-wide research question: How do animals use their noses to help them survive? We read the book What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. Then we read it again, discussing vocabulary and sentence structure and things, making sure we really understood it. Then we reread the section on noses one more time in order to collect evidence to answer our research question. (One of my biggest "aha!" moments from my course was the power of carefully choosing a good book to share with the class and reading it multiple times for deeper learning.) These are our shared notes.
Then we had a making-meaning discussion where we had to really talk about each animal in detail and explain in our own words what the brief notes meant. This was hard work and helped us to really learn and remember this information.
Finally we were ready to talk about the big idea from our research and we came up with the focus statement: "Animals use their noses in many different ways to help them survive."
We copied down the class focus statement, then each worked to write two sentences to explain each piece of evidence from our notes. We each ended up with a really high-quality writing piece to teach others about some interesting uses some animals have for their noses! These will come home soon.
But then, our work was not done. Currently, we are practicing this whole process of becoming an expert on a topic and writing about it again-- this time in small groups in which students are using the same source (but another section of it) to research another animal body part of their choice. We have a group for eyes, tails, mouths, and feet. Here are the note charts ready to go for the small groups:
We had to work together in our small groups to reread the appropriate section and discuss it and tell the teacher what notes to write about which animals. Then we had to discuss what these notes meant and make sure we really understood them.
And now, we are in the process of writing in these small groups each day. Soon we will have these small group pieces done and display them on the wall for everyone to see our hard work-- and great drawings that go with the text to help readers learn about our topics.
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