Nonfiction Reflection 1st Grade

The most important things I wanted my students to come away from this unit with was to be able to define fiction and nonfiction and describe what a nonfiction/fiction text looks like, as well as determine whether or not a certain text is fiction or nonfiction. I really wanted students to learn that nonfiction texts contain facts and can help us learn about a topic. Most, if not all, of my students grasped these concepts and after working with nonfiction texts for over 10 days they are for the most part able to identify nonfiction versus fiction. A few students still need a little extra practice determining the difference between these texts and these students are getting additional support in reading and writing workshops. I make sure to visit these students and ask additional questions with them one-on-one to reinforce these ideas. The students that are taken out of class for resource room support are also being given more practice with nonfiction and being exposed to more nonfiction texts. We will continue to work on nonfiction in the next few weeks and we will work further on nonfiction writing as we begin our science unit on insects. Students will be able to apply their nonfiction knowledge to the content areas.

One area where some students struggled and others excelled was the vocabulary. I learned that some of my students easily understood these new words and created very interesting sentences with these words that showed they understood their meanings. It pleasantly surprised me how well some students did. I have begun encouraging these students especially (as well as the whole class) to look for these words in other texts they read and to use these interesting words in their writing. Also, some students included other new things we have been learning in writing workshop in their vocabulary writing, which was great to see. Some of these things include the use of questions marks and exclamation marks. Some students, however, struggled more with the vocabulary and they needed more one-on-one help creating and writing their sentences. The problem I found was that it was hard to determine if the students didn't understand the word and its meaning or if they just could not write what they were thinking. With these particular students I tried to visit these students first during individual work time to have them verbalize their thoughts and I would then help them with the writing portion.

There is not much I would change if I were to reteach these lessons because I think they went well and I was pleased with their written work, which included pulling out a fact from a nonfiction text at their reading level and writing a sentence with a new vocabulary word in it along with an illustration. I am interested to see if the students will use the anchor charts with these words on them which are hung up in our room and if they will use these words in their writing. I personally try to use these words as much as possible. I have already had one student pointing out to the class that I used one of our "new words" and another (that struggles with writing) that used it in her writing which I was excited to see!