All About Nonfiction

Generally speaking, students do not often pick up a nonfiction book on their own. Most students browsing through our classroom library tend to lean towards reading fiction books. But in first grade, we are all about nonfiction! We are reading nonfiction, writing nonfiction, and working with nonfiction during our small group time. Throughout this nicely aligned unit, one of the biggest challenges for students is to take what they are learning and put it into their own words. Students frequently want to go back and reread a page to share word for word what they learned. 

With this in mind, we have been using bubble maps to record what we are learning from a nonfiction text. During our small group time, students have been reading all about different animals. After we have reread a nonfiction text, we work together to record what we have learned in our bubble map. We have built the habit of starting with our books closed to make sure we are using our own words to share something we learned. We then open our books to help us spell any animal specific words, such as nectar and hive in a book about honeybees. This process helps students to really slow down and think about what they have learned. By the end, we have all the important information we have learned in one place. We will mimic this process as we begin collecting information to write our own nonfiction books later this month!

Here are some of the bubble maps that students have completed to record all that they have learned from a nonfiction book.