Nonfiction Book Poster Project

Last week we reviewed nonfiction text structures and features with our students.  We always feel like they love reading nonfiction.  However, when you start breaking out the questions about text structures and graphic features, they get bored real quick.  

This year we started out by reading some nonfiction paired passages from our Celebrated Landmarks Product.  Not to brag, but our kiddos loved reading them! If you are interested in previewing, we have a FREEBIE posted too.  After getting them excited about all things nonfiction,

we had each student self select a nonfiction book from the library. We had to closely manage this because some were picking kinder level book, which were way too easy for this project. While others were picking books that had way too much information and would have overwhelmed them. So keep an eye on their selections.

Next, after giving them class time to read and explore their topics, we introduced the NONFICTION BOOK POSTER PROJECT.

Click HERE if you want to download the project requirements. It's a freebie! 

We started off by assisting the students with drafting their summaries.  Not an easy task.  Basically, we asked "What did you learn about your topic?"  If students were still struggling with summaries, we had them finish a few sentence stems to complete their summary.

The text __________ is about ____________.

First you should know _______________. (a detail from the book)

Also, I learned _____________________. (another detail from the book)

Finally, ___________________________. (another detail from the book)

Now I think _______________________. (opinion)

We loved how some of our researching and reasoning standards were hit as well as a few writing. 

Once they had their summaries drafted, we turned to identifying their book's text structure.  Our students really struggle with this concept, so we discuss what does the word structure mean.  It means the way something is built, so text structure means how the author builds a paragraph or article of information.  This is our second go around with text structure.  We review our notes and articles with different structures.  

Finally, the students worked on text features found in their books, author's purpose, and new vocabulary words learned.  

Then, the students transferred their drafts onto a single large piece of construction paper.  Some kids typed theirs and some wrote by hand.  We printed pictures We cut and glued. Last, we checked our assignment sheet to make sure we had everything required.

Below are a few examples of our students' finished posters. They turned out great! Click HERE if you would like to download the rubric we used to grade these!