Informational Expert Books

Happy Friday!  It sure was hard to go back after 4 days off!  I thought I would share some things we started before Thanksgiving and wrapped up this week. 

We did a little gallery walk of informational text features.  I placed a sticky note on each set
 of desks with a different text feature written on it then put various informational books
 out on each desk.   Students rotated around, read the sticky note and worked
 with a partner to find that particular feature in the book. 

For the past several weeks, my kiddos have been working really hard on nocturnal animal reports and they made these expert books with informational text features.  We started simple, and each book needed to include information about where the animal lives, it's prey, and its adaptations.  It also needed to include headings for each chapter, illustrations with captions, a diagram, a table of contents and a glossary.

I used the book template from my Tomie dePaola Author Study that goes with Little Grunt and the Big Egg. If you own the unit, I just covered the title "How to Care For Your Prehistoric Pet"  and ran off several of each page for students to use.  I wanted my kids to be able to use as many of each type of feature page as they needed, put the pages in the order they wanted, and assemble the books on their own.   I was partly checking to see the how they chose the order of their pages and whether they remembered that a table of contents would come first and a glossary last, and hurray,  they did! 

We also finished up our latest writing project a couple of weeks ago and published them
 in these fall trees from my Apple-icious September Writing Activities packet. 
My plan is to make a tree for each season and have students publish their best pieces of writing. 
 I'm saving all of the trees to make a display to hang at our end of the year open house.  I thought it would be so cute to have an orchard of trees covering all the walls! 
Maybe I'll call it "The Seasons of Our Writing".  Here's what we've done so far.

We've also been working on a body systems unit and did this adorable activity for each system from Andrea Knight's Smart Art Body Systems.   I love her Smart Art series!  There are several science concepts available and I'm also planning to use Andrea's weather bundle.   

Well, that about wraps up the last few weeks in my classroom and now it's on to Christmas and all things G*I*N*G*E*R*B*R*E*A*D! I can't wait!

Speaking of gingerbread....don't forget to enter my giveaway! Click on the picture to find it!

I'm linking up with Amanda at Teaching Maddeness for her Friday flashback!  It's kind of becoming my weekly tradition!  I love Amanda's blog and she now has all of her amazing resources on TPT.

You really should check out her store!