Turning Animal Facts into All About Books!
Our animal expert groups have been working hard to gather all the facts we can about our animals! After identifying what we wanted to learn, we spent time researching online and looking at books to answer our questions and learn as much as we can about our animals.
After gathering these facts, we talked about how we wanted our All About Animal nonfiction books to teach others about our animals. In order for people to learn from our books, they have to be able to read our writing and understand what we are trying to teach them.
To create these All About books, we started by turning our learning poster fact post-its into sentences that will teach people. We wrote these sentences on draft sheets.
After gathering these facts, we talked about how we wanted our All About Animal nonfiction books to teach others about our animals. In order for people to learn from our books, they have to be able to read our writing and understand what we are trying to teach them.
To create these All About books, we started by turning our learning poster fact post-its into sentences that will teach people. We wrote these sentences on draft sheets.
Then, we used special purple pens to do some editing, turning our fact sheet drafts into “sloppy copies”. In our collaborative groups, we re-read our writing and used everything we have learned to make sure our writing easy to read. We checked to see if there were spaces between our words and that our words were printed neatly, using lower case letters unless upper case letters were needed to start a sentence. We re-stretched out hard to read words, helping each other hear as many sounds as we could and used our animal word banks to spell important animal vocabulary words like they would be spelled in a book.
Once our facts were edited with our special purple pens, they were ready to be turned into fact pages to go in our nonfiction books. We worked really hard to publish our newly edited facts, using our best handwriting and adding pictures that make sense with our facts. By the end of this week, all of our groups had written all of the pages for their book and were working on organizing their books into chapters. Next week, we will bind out books and then work with Mr. Jeffrey to create online books using Voice Thread.
Getting a hands-on feel for how big our African Animals really are!
Last week, we used our measuring skills to draw 2 dimensional life-sized pictures of our animals. After collaboratively drawing our animals, groups started painting them with Ms. Meg. Next week, we will finish painting the animals and then hang them in the hallway for everyone to see. We will also be creating other things to turn our hallway into an African Savanna!