facts=non fiction.....

well first off how did we get to February already??? Last time I checked I was getting ready for the holidays and now we are into third quarter, which always seems to sadden me because I know my days are now rapidly decreasing with the amount of time I have with my students.  And with a class like I have this year, I don't want to let them go :(  however, that part of being a fifth grade teacher, in our district at least.  

so what have we been filling our time with at school...non fiction.  for some reason our non fiction comprehension scores tend to be lower on state tests, so this is something we hit on all year, but we also have a unit in Language Arts devoted to it.  Of course we READ non fiction text in everything during this unit: modeled reading, guided reading, center work...you name it's there.  A story that we have from the Scholastic series (but is also a book) is The Secrets of Vesuvius and from year to year the kids just love this text.  During the reading I have big spaces on my white board that are labeled "EWWW", "NO WAY", and AWESOME".  I give students 3 sticky notes a day (usually takes 3 days to read) and they have to write down a fact from the text that would fit into those categories, and yes I of course have those students who say, "nothing in here is gross to me, I watch ......(fill in the blank with any number of gross movies/t.v. shows" to which I always say too bad, you still have to find one:) And believe me there are some 'eww' parts in the text.  Last year I created a simple template for summary that I label: I Think You Should Know and they choose three facts that they would think someone should know about what happened at  Mt. Vesuvius.  I added this year another box at the bottom that was labeled: My Own View in which I asked them to give their overall view of what they learned from the text.

now this year for some reason, as I'm sure happens to everyone, we were reading A LOT of passages about ocean life.  Our resource of Literacy By Design has a whole unit about Ocean Life and students were selecting guided reading books about ocean life.  I found center activities that went with our unit comprehension strategy which had passages that dealt with Oceans Life, so I had the student complete another slip on Ocean Life.  And of course as always happens I have those student who finish their task earlier than others, so I thought well why not have them create a display to hang outside our room.  I split those who had finished into groups to work on one of the two displays, had them choose creative directors who would design the poster, researchers who would look up real pictures to add to the poster, and decorators who would follow the directors' vision to color, glue, and complete the final project.  And amazingly those "slow workers" quickened their pace to be able to work on a poster.  Here are the finished pieces, I had no role in the creation (except the half sheet of paper to write their responses on, I even had students die cut the letters to make the banner!) 

I would highly suggest that if you are like me before (a control freak, who has to do everything herself) let your students create whole class visuals. These turned out AWESOME, better then what I could/would have done. And the pride that the students have of having a part in the display that others ooohhh and aaahhhh at is priceless.