I’ve been using this book to help guide our Writer’s Workshop lessons:

Explorations in Non-fiction Writing

We are currently working on the “Informational” tab.  The children and I have been working hard on collecting information through research about ladybugs!  This book is wonderful because it not only comes with the teachers’ guide, but a Big Book of Mentor Texts, and CD and the bigger teachers’ manual.

The book suggests writing about crickets or some other insect.  We chose to write about ladybugs because I had lots of books about them already.  One of the first things we do is talk about features of great reports (title, lots of information, etc.).  We then wrote on sticky notes to fill in our R.A.N. chart.  We wrote down Things we Think We Knew about ladybugs in our research notebooks.

Next, we spent some time at our first research stations:

Here we are looking at books to gather important information about ladybugs.  I modeled for a pretty good chunk of time what that looked like and how we just don’t copy words from the book. 🙂

We also observed some pictures to find out more information about ladybugs.  These pictures did not have many words, so the children had to describe what they were seeing in the pictures to help them gather their information.

Our last research station was the Promethean Board.  I pulled up the National Geographic kids site about ladybugs.  The children tapped the arrows under the pictures to rotate through them as they collected information.

We will be rotating through these stations for at least 4 more days so that the children can collect information from each of the sources.  We will then use that information to help us to write our larger class report.  Once we have written our class report, the children will pick an insect of their own and use the same process to research their insect and write a report.

Kristen 🙂