Nonfiction Features, New Technology!

Nonfiction Texts

We spent a lot of time last week thinking about nonfiction text, both in reading and writing workshops. Mrs. Boucher, our technology integration specialist, lead the class in a great lesson about reading digital texts last Monday, using the National Geographic Kids website and a section about penguins. Since we access information in so many different ways now, it's important to to learn how to read both digital and printed texts and to know how to easily and efficiently navigate both.

We are working our way through learning about nonfiction text features found in printed texts, and last week we really dug into how headings, table of contents, and labels are helpful in both reading and writing. Students started to use headings in their own nonfiction teaching books to tell the reading what that page/section is mostly about. Using headings is an effective way to help organize our ideas for writing too--this page will be about ______, this page will be about _________, etc. 

Maps are an important feature found in many nonfiction texts--digital and printed. Here, students are studying a map of where various animals live.

Learning how to navigate a website is important, as information is located in many areas of the site. For example, tabs help us get to new sections to learn/see more information.

Students worked with their table groups to find headings in nonfiction books from our classroom library. They found many excellent examples and were able to tell why headings are helpful to the reader.

Looking for headings is fun, and it's hard to resist looking for interesting new information too!

Sharing their findings with an "elbow partner" (someone sitting next to them).

The book about stars in the above picture has headings on the side tabs and at the top of each page--cool format!

Chromebooks!

And....drumroll, please! Mrs. Hughes and I are part of another pilot--Chromebooks! We are very excited to explore this new tool in the classroom and determine it's potential uses/value as technology to invest in for the future. While iPads will continue to be an important technological tool in our classroom, it will be valuable to compare Chromebooks, iPads, and laptops for various learning purposes. We have five Chromebooks to share between our rooms for the remainder of the school year. HOORAY!!!!!!