Focusing on Non-Fiction

It seems as though this year lends itself for the PERFECT time to teach Non-Fiction!

 To this point in the year we have read plenty of fiction books. 

So when introducing a new "genre" of books, the kiddos are enthralled!

To kick off our unit we watch a Brainpop on fiction vs. nonfiction.

We create these anchor charts together. 

And then we take a look at a few books from our class library and sort them to go with our charts.

Each day over the past week we learned one or two new features that we see in non-fiction books.

We created this chart with each feature, an example and its purpose.

It will hang in our room all year long.

I was thinking of a way to have my kiddos kind of show me what they learned when I came across the perfect idea from Smitten with First! It's like my friend just read my mind and gave me just what I needed.

So using her idea, I wrote the name of each feature on a different color paper and hung them around the room while the students hunted through their Kids Time Magazine to hunt for the features.

Once they found a feature, they wrote that page number on a sticky note and went to place it on the paper.

It was a great way to get my little firsties working while getting up and moving at the same time!

This is definitely an activity I will be incorporating into our non-fiction study every year.

Check back shortly for more ideas in our non-fiction study!