Animal Reserch Reports

My 1st grade students have been working real hard on their Animal research reports over the past few weeks. We started out by talking about nonfiction animal books. We used the Pebble Go series because, 1. our library has tons of them, & 2. they are VERY kids friendly. I picked Giraffes, check out this cover! My tatter tots could not stop giggling because he has got his tongue in his nose. :)

Anyway once we talked about nonfiction books and it's components, which took a couple of days, we then dove into our research. I made a graphic organizer for my students that has 6 topics: What the animal looks like, eats, where it lives, babies, predators/ survival and other/ fun facts.

Here is  a download of my graphic organizer.

Non Fiction Graphic Organizer

We fold it in 3 parts and the side with "Other Facts" and the "Name" line should face out.

Then we tuck it in our books. This makes my life easier because I don't have to pass out a bunch of papers and books. It all gets passed out at once.

The first day I model what it looks like to take notes from our books. The second day I model again and then have them go off to take notes independently. The third day, I review with a quick model and then they attempt to take notes on 2 sections in one day. It usually takes a day or two more to get the whole graphic organizer filled up.

After we learn to take notes from a book, we learn to take notes from the internet. My school is lucky enough to have laptop carts for us to check out & use in our classrooms when an opportunity arises. So I pulled a few for this lesson. You could stretch this out for 2 days and with a larger group I would, but my 1st grade ELL classes are pretty small so 1 day was enough for us. We went to the animal section of  Pebble Go.com and signed in. This is what we see:

Because we were only spending 1 day with the laptop I just had the students type their animal name in the search box above. In the past I have allowed my students to kind of roam around looking for their animal... not this year. Anyway, Once they find their animal they see this page.

I love this site because it is so kid user friendly. If you notice on the bottom of the page there are different tabs to pick from. Here's the best part for my ELL kids, if you click on the speaker the text will be read to you! If you click on a word you don't know it will say it for you too, and bold words get a pop up window with the definition. On the top right there is a "watch" button that allows the student to see a few minute long video of their animal. they LOVE that part. The very last thing we do is click on the "Print and Label Picture" button. This prints out a color picture of the animal which the students then label for their report. Here is a picture of what it looks like.

You will notice that the words and definitions are on the bottom for easy referencing. :) I print up 2. One in color and one in black & white for us to practice on first.

After all their research is completed we then start to write up our report. We use the paper below.

Nonfiction Heading Paper, Portrait

I follow the same pattern to teach my lessons as I did with the taking notes section. The top two lines are for their heading, even though not every page will get a heading. So if "What the animal looks like" takes up two pages the first one will have the heading & the second one wont. will I make sure and stress that they do not illustrate until their writing is finished so that their words match their picture. Again that will take several days to complete.

Once all that work is done we start to put the finishing touches to our report. We number our pages, & create a table of contents and references page. I make a cover page using the Comic Life program. Then I take them and bind them! *whew*

I decided not to post the Table of Contents & References pages because I know you all would come up with something WAY cuter. If you want them leave me a comment and I will email them to you. There are pictures down below of some examples.

Here is what they look like.

Here is one on Zebras:

We spend a lot of time on these so we make sure to have a celebration for our hard work. I have even been know to have my students visit several rooms around the school to read what we have learned. This year I decided to turn them into their second Digital story. Once I get them all done I might be able to post them. However, that is a whole post by its self. :)

I do something similar with my Kinder kids only we do a whole class report instead of individual reports. I won't get to those until the very end of the year. Thank goodness, I don't think I could take it right now.

I hope this helped you in one way or another. I am sure I have left out a ton of steps. Please feel free to ask if something was unclear.

Ms. M