Animal Nonfiction Writing

We have been having so much fun with our animal unit! I wish I could spend another week on this unit, but we've still got some other science and social studies topics to get to before the end of the year. Animals has been such a great backdrop for discussing nonfiction reading and writing, and the kids have been really engaged in the activities to try out this kind of genre.

Last week, each student was asked to write about an animal for their Home Journal writing assignment and on Friday, the students shared something they learned with the class. I loved this idea for making a Did You Know list and book that I found on A Place Called Kindergarten, and thought it would be a great way to document some of the facts that everybody learned about animals. Half-day Kindergarten is so short that it seems almost impossible to spend as much time as I would like learning about all the amazing animals out there, so letting kids do some research and writing at home to share with everyone seemed to work really well with our schedule.

Everybody shared one fact that they have learned about an animal, and we made a chart.

Later in the day, I hung the charts up on the whiteboard so the kids could copy their sentence for our Did You Know? book. Normally, this is not the kind of writing I prefer to do with my kids...I heavily encourage them to write independently using sound spelling and other strategies. But I used this activity to focus on writing sentences, rather than spelling technique. Each student wrote down their sentence and then illustrated it to make a page in our class book. It turned out beautifully, and has been a favorite to look at during reading time!