When I learned that Carla was writing about Project Based Learning (PBL), I thought about things that help make PBL successful in my classroom. One of the most difficult things in my kindergarten class was finding nonfiction resources that my students could use relatively independently.
As we are heading into the spring, I know many lower level teacher who are going to be working on research with their kiddos. In kindergarten in particular, as this is where my experience lies, it can be difficult to find nonfiction texts for your beginning readers. A few years ago, I dreaded researching with my class due to their lack of independence. With the help of my local library and through some personal research, I'd found a few sets of books that have made it much easier. I'm going to share some photos I took of the books in each series to give you a sneak peek.
The first set I want to share is something many of you are probably familiar with: Pebble Plus books. These are published by Capstone and typically written around an H-I guided reading level. These are great for my higher kids but still manageable enough for my lower level kids to at least get something out of. The text is laid out for early readers. Here are a few peeks into one of these books.
The second book series is another one that I used sporadically, but last year our building bought sets to go with the themes we have. I like the Blastoff Readers Books. I only use the Level 1 books because these are most manageable for my kids. I like the nonfiction text features in these.
Last, but certainly not least, is my favorite for the earliest of readers: Bullfrog Books from Jump!. I first checked a few of these out at the library about this time 2 years ago and instantly fell in love. They are simple to read, generally guided reading levels C-E, have awesome photos and great text features. I just found that these are starting to come out in paperback, which makes me SO excited because it is so expensive to add a large amount of hardback books to a classroom library.
I hope these book ideas have given you some new ideas for the research your kiddos do. I'd love to hear about any other books or resources you have been successful with your students!
Do you use EPIC books? If so, many of the Blast Off books are there too! My kiddos LOVE them!
ReplyDeleteI have an account, but I haven't done much with it. Thanks for the tip; we'll definitely use them when we start our animal research next week!
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