Super Informational Writing!

My kiddos finished up some truly SUPER informational writing pieces during this spring. I wanted to finish translating the template and getting the pack ready to share with you all before I posted them...and now that I have a little more free time with school out...it is finally ready to go!

In creating their pieces my kids worked hard to select a topic of interest to them, research the topic in a variety of ways, and go through the writing process from beginning to end to publish a piece of informational writing in English. I am seriously honored to share some of their work with you today. I am so proud!

After immersing ourselves in a variety of informational texts and learning the why's and how's of how authors select their topics, each of my students chose a topic they either knew a great deal about and/or were dying to learn about!

Here are just a few they came up with:

My students were each required to create at least four chapters for their pieces as well as an introduction and conclusion. Here are some examples of the chapters written from the pieces above:

As you can see some students chose to print images from home to add...and others created their own illustrations! I left it up to them :)!

The voice of this student in this piece on volleyball just shines through. I love it! Check out the second page..."You should not wear any type of jewelry or braces".  Too funny! You can see this one used a marker to bolden "jersey" and "braces" as well as they were part of her glossary of course!

Each of the students were also required to add at least one "extra" in the publishing process. They could do this through including a Glossary, Index, Table of Contents, etc. 

Here are some completed examples that go with a book titled "How to Take Care of a Puppy":

I love her dedication page...just perfect for her topic!

I seriously wish I could share all of their work with you all! They were so excited to share them with one another!

If you are interested in creating informational pieces with your students, my newest pack includes all of the pages shown here and more for your students use! Of course, they all come in English and Spanish as well! Click on the image to take you to my TpT store!

Plants and the NBA!

Today we explored the inside of a seed! Each student received a lima bean that had been soaked in water to open up and examine! We created this super simple class anchor chart to share what we saw.

The kids were so surprised that a seed has many of the same characteristics and needs many of the same things as we do!

Third trimester is also our big trimester for non-fiction retells in our district. They can get to be a little monotonous at times with all of the practice so I always try my best to spice it up for them and select topics of interest! My boys are absolutely OBSESSED with basketball. One of them bought me this book that I shared with you a week or two ago at the book fair that shares short biographies on a variety of "NBA heroes".

I read about one of the players for my students and modeled an example of how to retell the section. The black words are the key words the students should use in their retells. The orange are the words I used related to my particular text.

After this, I put my students in groups of three and gave each group a photocopy of a photo of their player and the information in the text about them. The groups had to work together to read the text, then using my example as a guide, write their own retell of the section!

And here is our finished product to add to our retelling wall...

Seriously...my boys peed their pants they were so excited about this!