We had to have a lot of modeling in Writer's Workshop on how to start an informational report. #KFkinders were REALLY good at writing detail sentences (because we were so excited to learn new things about our animals), but we struggled to come up with a topic sentence that would cover the main idea of each chapter. So we practiced while learning about sharks. We really had to dig deep and review what it meant to find the main idea of our report, and then craft that into a topic sentence. We would read a little bit each day about sharks, then stop and decide what the main idea was. Once we found the main idea, we could then outline details. After we found all our details, we went back and composed a topic sentence together and wrote it on our poster. This helped when we would go to write our informational report for the day because we could read our topic sentence and that is how we started our report! Then we would look at what details we learned. Mrs. Fisher would not write the details in complete sentences because that was something we could do by ourselves. We would use our turn and talk partners to say a complete sentence with each detail from the poster. This is what we called our detail sentences! When we were all done practicing that, the last hard part came. We couldn't just end our report with a detail, so we worked together again to come up with an ending (closing) sentence. This sentence kind of sounds like a topic sentence! This was really hard for us, so we came up with the sentence together and Mrs. Fisher would write it on the poster. Then after we wrote all of our detail sentences by ourselves, we could look at the poster and remember the awesome ending sentence we came up with. Check out an example of our Writer's Workshop poster below.
After a lot of practice writing our informational reports together in Writer's Workshop, we were ready to try them in Workstations. For our informational reports #KFkinders got to pick to be 1 of the following animal groups:
- snakes
- spiders
- penguins
- whales
Within these groups we tried to learn as much as we possibly could about our animal. We read books, we watched YouTube videos, we asked Google for some fact checking! It was so much fun. Then we took time to write a chapter book about our animals. To do this we had to do some pre-writing (what...kinders can use graphic organizers?!?! ABSOLUTELY!!). We drew concept webs, we identified 3 topics we wanted to write about, and we outlined details for each topic with Mrs. Andresen. Check out some examples of our pre-writing stage!
The next stage was to use our detail outlines to write a a chapter. We split our report into 3 different chapters, so that meant we needed to write 3 different topic sentences...oh my! The first 2 chapters were still a little hard for us to come up with the topic sentences on our own, but by the 3rd chapter it started all coming together! We got to use our detail outlines to help us write our detail sentences, and then Mrs. Fisher helped us with the ending sentences. When we were done, we had a chapter book of informational reports on our animal.
The final stage was reading our informational report in front of the green screen. We love to use the green screen and share with our families. It is great to read through our writing and to listen to ourselves read. Listen to see how fluent I am reading aloud, this is always something we can work on at home when I bring home a Take Home Book or a piece of writing! Enjoy!
Kaleb-Spiders
Leah-Snakes
Brock-Whales
I learned so much watching the videos! Thanks for sharing your learning, KF!
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