Our next unit in a reading and writing involves the study of informational texts. This unit is geared toward helping students recognize different text structures and how writers organize informational text so that their readers can truly understand their messages.
To get this process started, we began by brainstorming a list of the topics we have covered this year and then began to talk about smaller topics within those topics so that we could start to see how they could turn into interesting research projects.
The next day, I granted their wish–with the caveat that they were reading the books as writers hunting for things that the authors did to clearly “teach” us in their book. I challenged them to try to learn not just the content of the book–but to learn about writing nonfiction as well. After a nice reading time, we added to our list a little bit!