Today we finished our class book all about the parks in New York City! This collaborative writing assignment walked us through the writing process so that we can begin our independent writing projects next week already knowing the entire process.First, we immersed ourselves in the genre of nonfiction informational texts to learn the features. We charted those noticings before our on-demand writing at the beginning of the unit.
Then we began planning our writing by mapping out our chapters and the headings within those chapters.
After that, we used lots of books, maps, pictures, observations, and interviews to gather even more information about the parks in NYC.
Then we began drafting our sections. Each student wrote under one heading, working in groups of students within their chapter. After three days of drafting, students began revising by adding more details, writing "kick-off sentences" to hook the reader, changing our words, and deleting repetitive phrases.
Because the purpose of this work was to practice the craft of writing information texts, the editing (for punctuation, spelling, and capitals) and the publishing (for improved handwriting and legibility) was not necessary for the students to practice. The book was published so that the legibility would not be an issue for any reader who wanted to read our book. After the writing was done, we reviewed our list of what nonfiction all-about books should have based on our notes during the immersion. We realized that a lot of things we saw informational text had we didn't have in our book! To begin fixing this, we each created an informative picture that had a caption and labels to teach our readers more about our topics. After that, we reviewed our list of attributes again. We realized that there were still six things we needed to add to our book:
- A cover with a catchy title that tells the reader what the whole book is about and a picture that matches
- A blurb on the back that tells the reader about the entire book
- An introduction to begin the book
- Fun Facts throughout the book
- An index and a glossary
- Additional pictures to fill in the spaces throughout the book
We first wrote the introduction together as a shared writing piece. Then we broke into five groups to plan the cover, the back of the book, the index (the students deemed a glossary unnecessary since all new words were defined within the text), the Fun Fact boxes, and the additional pictures to add more information to the book. The students worked in groups of 3-5 to complete the book today.
Below are picture of our completed, published book. If you are around, feel free to come check out our actual book in Room 402! We'll be sharing it with our reading buddies, the first graders across the hall, and many others throughout the coming weeks. We now know the writing process for informational texts, so next week we will be off to a great start for our personal writing pieces!
- Liz
