The start of the school year seems incredibly hectic. Getting to know kids. Getting to know parents. Curriculum night. Pre-assessing kids. Establishing routine. Ugh!
Instead of dwelling on the length of the week, I'm going to focus on our focus in reading. Our Math-Science-Social Studies/Literacy rotations began this week. My focus was on understanding the different features that are unique to non-fiction, and how they can be used to comprehend text. I started in the kids' wheelhouse: what makes a piece of writing fiction? Simple question that befuddled some of my kiddos- "really, you don't know what fiction is? It is just fiction!" Sometimes seeing something over and over is the most difficult thing to explain (granted all my kids were able get with it, and respond to that question accurately).
From there we transitioned into: what is non-fiction, and what features make non-fiction special? Kids were comparing their chapter books to our social studies text, and creating a T-chart of their findings. From some it was really important to not only share out the feature to the whole group, but turn to the page where it was located so they could visualize what the feature was (hmm what is a diagram? what is a glossary?). Again, seems simple but can be really powerful (and a great reminder).
But it wasn't enough to just identify features, but now we need to use them! So I had 4 questions that kids needed to answer, but they needed to use the features in order to respond. All of that was getting at our content goal of understanding what in the world geography is! Really really great start to rotations!
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