Adventures in Literacy Land: research

Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

Author Studies

Happy Monday, everyone!  Today I'd like to share with you an author study project we worked on a couple weeks ago.  We were blessed to have author/illustrator Todd Parr visit our building in November, and since his visit, my students have been asking to learn about more authors and/or illustrators.  As we near the end of the year, I knew I wanted to fit this in more than just sharing a tidbit or two about some of their favorite authors.

Students were in 5 groups, and each group was given a choice of 4 different authors.  I tried to choose authors whose books students would be able to read relatively independently. I did not give authors we already knew a little bit about as options.  Once authors were chosen, I worked with my school librarian and visited the public library to get as many books by each author as I could.

We began by researching the author using Wikipedia, each author's website and author interviews on Scholastic.com.  One student in each group volunteered to be the recorder and took notes for the group.  Authors chosen were: Eric Carle, Doreen Cronin, Laura Numeroff, Peter Reynolds and Leo Lionni.


After learning about the author, students began reading the different books the author had written. They would talk to each other as they were reading and many noticed some similarities or took note of things they learned from their research as they read.  These books quickly became popular picks during independent reading time and in our classroom library!



Once we had learned about the author and read many of their works, it was time to plan how to share our learning with the class.  Each group had the opportunity to make a presentation in any way they would like, but there had to be at least 1 visual element.  They were also encouraged to have a group member share one of their author's books, though this was not required.

Three groups chose to make posters about their author, and two groups were feeling adventurous and decided to try a new app, Adobe Voice.  Each group had at least 1 student volunteer to read; in fact, one group had all 4 want to read, so they read two books in total, each reading half of a book.  The groups that made posters were each given a piece of poster board and some garage sale sign type cutouts (Dollar Tree).  They also downloaded images of the author's books using Google Images to include on their posters.

The final step after projects were complete was to share them with the class.  They love to share with one another!




This group struggled to find photos on Google Images, so decided to use clipart, which I thought was a kindergarten-appropriate decision!

My students loved learning not only about the author their group researched, but they were interested to know what their friends learned as well.  One of my students was so excited to learn about Laura Numeroff, she has decided to write her own book in her style during our free writing time.

What types of author or book studies have you done with your students?  How to you make these connections with students?



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The Research Paper Made Simple

Even young children can write simple research papers with an easy mentor text and model for writing.
Even our youngest students can write  simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

When I help students write their first research paper, I love to use The Important Book  by Margaret Wise Brown. If you haven't seen this book, you really need to check it out! It has a simple way of telling about something that makes it easy for students to learn more about something and provides a great mentor text for helping students write in an easy way.
After reading the book aloud to them, I started out by modeling what I wanted them to research. I used a Tree Map to show them the information I found about horses. This also served as the information I wanted them to search for their research. I put a star next to the "important" fact and circled the other information I wanted to include.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

After I created my Tree Map, they chose their animals to research and researched to create their Tree Maps.

Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.
They chose their important thing with a star and the others were circled.

Then I wrote my paragraph using the information and creating a model for them to use.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

They used my model to write a rough draft to edit and revise. Their final copy was complete with a picture at the top.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

Overall, these second graders learned a lot about some simple research to get them ready for third grade. They really enjoyed working on this and took great pride in it ~ something they all need!

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Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.








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Nonfiction Resources for Beginning Readers


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!




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Research: The Key to Unlocking the Door to Discovery

Do you struggle with managing research projects? Check out this post for five steps you can use to simplify the process.

Just about every classroom is expected to teach students to research, but just about every child wants the work to be done quick and simple. Yet researching is a lifelong skill kids need. Researching takes perseverance, doesn't it. BUT, if we give kids the knowledge of how to research, we unlock the door to discovering pretty amazing things. Kids are curious, aren't they?  So, tap into that curiosity and work researching skills into your routine.

As students work through the process, other reading skills are included such as main idea/details, text features, determining importance, and fact and opinion. As writers, students learn how paragraphs are organized with a topic sentence, supporting detail sentences, and a closing, and how paragraphs come together to explain in depth. So how can we make all of this easier for kids?

The first step in researching is to make the assignment clear and share why researching is important. Kids need to know exactly what is expected right from the beginning, so using anchor charts to outline what they will be doing and the steps involved, modeling how to get started, and what information students will be looking for breaks the assignment down into chewable bites.

Next, list the information sources they are expected to learn to use and demonstrate how to use them. Kids need to know how to use key words and which resources match the needs they have. Will the internet be used?  Are kids allowed to search on Google?  It's important that the kids know the rules in order to avoid breaking them.

Once the kids have the gameplan, they are ready to dig in, or are they? Well, you probably should model with anchor papers what is expected and demonstrate with a class paper how to conduct research. Outline the steps in a checklist to keep your kids organized and provide due dates for each section. As you ask the kids to do a step, model with the anchor paper how to do it.

As students work through the process, keeping them on task and working toward completion can be a problem. You can avoid that by having them use self evaluations to monitor their own progress. Collect and give feedback on the pieces of working leading up to the final project. If the kids have a rubric to follow, it will help them know how they will be graded.

If you have struggling students, you may find assigning the same topic to a group helpful. Then, you can pull them into a small group for guidance versus spreading yourself thin trying to reach and help them all. I'd suggest preselecting resources as a way to get students started, and you may also want to enlist the help of teaching assistants and/or your school librarian. If you want students to use the internet, you can use QR codes to ensure that your students get to the correct location on the web. 

Well, I hope these tips help you the next time you're scratching your head and trying to figure out how to get your kids to the final draft. To help you out, I put together this step-by-step freebie that you can use with any topic. Enjoy!
Writing Research Reports Made Easy

Happy Researching and see you next month!


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