Navigating non-fiction
This unit will offer students a chance to explore the wide world of high-interest non-fiction texts. Reading across a variety of self-chosen topics for the first weeks of the unit will provide students the time to practise some essential non-fiction reading skills. Later in the unit, students will be asked to focus on a topic connected to the topic of their feature article in Writing Workshop, giving them an opportunity to conduct research and gather relevant information. Students will also spend time talking and sharing ideas with their reading partners, as well as pushing themselves to expand their thinking, grow ideas together and stay accountable to the text. In addition to non-fiction reading, students will also continue to read novels, practising the skills they have already learned.
Intended Learning:
- How does using evidence from a text support my thinking?
- How can I determine the main idea in a text?
- When reading deeply within a topic/subject, how will I use my knowledge of structure to determine importance?
- How am I reading to learn both from graphics and through text?
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In the examples below from the National Geographic magazine for kids, information is shared in an engaging and effective way for the target audience. Comparisons between contrasting animals are made to illustrate animal characteristics or traits.
In addition to being able to recognise the structural and language features of non-fiction texts, we will be developing the children's thinking a little further. This is to do with the idea that the reading isn't really over when the reading itself has finished. It's only really over when the children have grown some new ideas as a result of their reading. In other words, we want the children to be more than just repositories for knowledge but to develop their own questions, thoughts, connections and theories as a consequence of the information they have read.
Next unit... Research based argument essay.
