All About Writing

We wrapped up our first "All About" books last week and the kids.had.a.blast!!!!!!!!  Each year, this unit gets better and better!  This year, I made some revisions to it, and loved how they turned out.  See our unit in photos below!

In first grade, the Common Core Standards state that children must be able to:

• "Participate in shared research and writing projects" {W 1.7}

• "Write informative/explanatory texts in which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic, and supply some sense of closure."  {W 1.2}

• "Know and use various text features to locate key facts or information in a text." {RI 1.5}

Prior to this unit, we had just completed our nonfiction notebooks.  I wanted the kids to have a good knowledge of non-fiction text features so that when they used them in their books, they would be familiar. I started this unit by selecting some animals and collecting books on them.  I tried to avoid farm animals, as we are starting our farm unit next week!  I ended up going with 5 animals and put my kids into groups of 4.  I gave them time in their groups to "explore" the books.  Once they had a chance to look over the books, they got to work illustrating their cover pages!

Covers completed.  Day 2, we worked on our introduction.  I put up this template as a guide to help children.  All they had to do was fill in their animal's names.  We also worked on the table of contents!  The kids felt like experts on this because of the time we spent on our nonfiction notebooks prior!

Day 3 we moved onto the "research."  I didn't give my students many guidelines for this, other than the content must be in their own words and each person in the group must contribute at least one fact.

Day 4 was diagram day and the kids loved finding diagrams in their books!

On the last day, everyone completed their rubric and self-assessed.  The students who were behind caught up while others wrote their "About the Author" pages. The kids love this unit!  Tomorrow we will start a second book, with 5 different animals to choose from!  We'll celebrate in another week or so with a writing party.

I hope you enjoyed this post!  If this looks like something your little ones might enjoy, click the cover below.

xo
Megan