Animal Study: From Fiction to Facts
I chose to review this lesson because the first grade classroom that I work with at my school just finished a unit about animal groups. Student objectives in this lesson include comparing information from both fiction and nonfiction texts about animals, creating fact charts in whole group formats, using the internet to find more factual information about animals and recording factual information about animals. The lesson basically has the teacher reading one fiction and one nonfiction book about ants to the class and afterward the class, as a group, makes a chart about the factual information they learned about ants through both types of books. I thought it was a clever way to both talk about the difference between fiction and nonfiction as well as present facts about ants in a different way, as opposed to simply stating the facts and discussing them. In the lesson, the teacher asks questions that lead the students to discover the facts about ants their own. Also, this lesson could be applied to any animal, not just ants. So if I were to work with first grade next year while they are doing animal groups, I could use this lesson plan with any of the different kinds of animals they are studying, I would just need to change the books.
I also thought the internet component was interesting. My first reaction was there was no way six year olds could do internet research without serious one-on-one guidance. After looking at the sites suggested by the readwritethink lesson plan, I’m still unsure about the readwritethink website, but I’m not completely opposed to possibly doing a whole group lesson on how to do a simple search on a search engine such as Ask Jeeves for Kids for information on a certain topic, and then having students try on their own in small groups, maybe two or three at time. I think it would be beneficial to begin to start teaching them how to do that kind of thing, but they would need a lot of guidance!
Kim Strzelecki