2nd Grade- Nonfiction

For my lesson, I taught reader’s workshop on non-fiction. We had been working on nonfiction for a couple days, teaching the students about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. My lessons then focused on having the students look at two books about the same thing, animals, and having them decide which genre each book belong to and characteristics of each. We also looked at books that could be confusing to be placed into fiction or nonfiction and learned how to tell the genre.

Most of my students were able to see the difference between fiction and nonfiction. They were able to demonstrate this to me by separating their books into each genre. A couple students had difficulty doing this, which I saw because the students would put fiction books into nonfiction. They explained this by saying that the stories could happen. After explaining why the books would fiction, the student understood. Most of the rest of the class were easily able to identify the different genres. The next day, I read two books about worms, a fiction and nonfiction, and we made a chart together about what we noticed in each book. The students were easily able to pick out features of fiction and nonfiction to make this chart together. The following day, students worked in pairs to make their own charts as we made the day before. I believe modeling this as a class the day before greatly helped the students be able to make their own charts and pick out the differences between the fiction and nonfiction. Out of the class, only two pairs had trouble with this assignment. These two pairs were writing facts they learned about the animals on their charts from each book, instead of finding the parts of the book that made it fiction or nonfiction. I believe that with a little bit more clarification on what the students were expected to do, they would have been able to complete the assignment for what I wanted them to do. One of the other pairs also needed some support with the task. After, helping and confirming their thinking, they were able to successfully complete the assignment. Most of the students were able to take away from the lesson what I wanted them to by having them find the features of each book and writing about them in their chart.

Throughout my lessons, I was able to see that the students were understanding what nonfiction books are by talking to them and having them tell me how they knew the books they were reading were fiction or nonfiction. Students were excited to come to me to tell me the type of book they were reading and were able to pick out features in the book that helped them know. Also, for the third day of my lesson, I read the students a third book about worms that seemed like a fiction book, but was actually nonfiction. When teaching this lesson, the students knew right away that it was a nonfiction book. I had students turning and talking to someone throughout the lesson about what genre they thought the book was and why. As I walked around and heard what the students were talking about, I was able to see the students knew the book was nonfiction and could talk about why. The students were also able to tell me why the book could confuse someone about the genre, but did not confuse them.

Something I learned about my students was how many of them have trouble working in pairs. During the lesson in which the students had to read the books and make the chart, many of them had trouble working with their partner to get the work done. They would often argue over who would read the books, who would write, and what they would write down. We have been working in partners all year, but these lessons made me realize that the students often need reminders of how we work with our reading buddies. This is something that I have also been noticing throughout reader’s workshop as students are expected to read with their reading buddy everyday.

If I were going to reteach this lesson, I would provide extra support by making sure to model further what I expected the students to do. Although I modeled how to do this assignment the day before by reading two books and making a chart, I would make sure to be clearer on my instructions for them. I believe if I would have done this, it might have been clearer for the students who wrote facts about their animal instead of things they noticed about fiction and nonfiction. A second thing that I would do differently in the future would be to choose better books for the students to read and compare. Before the students were able to start making their chart, they had to read both the fiction and nonfiction books. I realized throughout the lesson that this was taking a lot of time for some students to do. Some of the books were longer and the students were taking their time reading them. While other student’s books were shorter and quicker to read, they completed this assignment much faster and were easier for them. Although the students who finished early had other things to do to keep them busy, the assignment took much to long for other students. Next time, I would look at the books closer to make sure they would not take as long to read.