Our science unit on penguins is by far one of my favorites! It ties so well into our nonfiction units both in reader's and writer's workshop. I use many nonfiction penguin books in reader's workshop to model strategies we are working on. The All About Penguins books we create help us understand the components of all about books. They also set the stage for the students to begin writing their own all about books with self-selected topics.
As always, we began with our schema chart. The students took some time to write down all that they knew about penguins onto their schema sheets. Then, we all chose one thing to write on a post-it and share with the class.
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| "I know penguins do not fly. They slide." "I know penguins are not mammals." "I know that penguins live in cold places." "I know that penguins eat fish." |
After reading some all about penguins books in reader's workshop, we began studying the texts to determine what kinds of pages we should include in our own All About Penguins books. These covers get me every time- so cute!!
We made a list of things All About Books have, such as diagrams, different kinds page, table of contents, interesting facts page, etc. Then, we got to work creating some of these pages for our own books.
I encourage everyone to use mentor texts to help them with their books! Here are some of us using the different kinds page in our mentor texts to get the details of each penguin drawn just right:
Tell me these aren't some of the sweetest penguin drawings you've seen!
Here's a few more pictures of other activities we did centered around our penguin unit. We sure did love learning all about penguins!
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| Partners work on can/have/are charts |
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| More partners at work |
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| Interactive Writing: our class created acrostic poem |
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