As we "attack" the new year, we are living in the world of non fiction. We began the new year writing New Year's Resolutions via the Writing to Explain and Writing to Inform platforms. I thought this would be a "no brainer" for the kids but proved to be so much more. The kids had general ideas as to what their resolutions would be, but conveying them to others in writing proved to be quite a learning opportunity. Via the world of modeling expectations and peer revision, these resolutions morphed into quite the writing project. An assignment I thought would take a few days ended up taking two weeks of time well spent.
As we move forward, I am looking forward to living in the world of non-fiction for the remainder of the year. This does not come without risk... I am turning the area of focus to those of my students...quite scary as I have no idea which way they will head and how I will decide to reign it in.
Next week we move into learning and examining the different structures of non fiction. We will use the inquiry method to launch our learning....Stay tuned for further information on how it goes....
I look forward to hearing how this all turns out. Teachers are taught to be such planners and it is scary when we have no idea what the road ahead will bring us when we leave it up to the students. But it can also be SO rewarding and inspiring. I hope you are able to find the fine line of reigning it in and cultivating their sense of ownership! Keep us posted!
ReplyDeleteThe world of non-fiction can be daunting to most kids, but don't you agree that kids love to learn about interesting topics? They have no idea they are learning about text structures, text features, and new vocabulary. The tough part is learning how to figure out what to do with that interesting information. It sounds remarkably similar to what happened with the resolutions. Fun times!
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