Summarizing Penguins-Nonfiction

Kids love animals. So, as we plug away with our "Summarizing" pathway, I decided to use an article that I "found" about a penguin that washed ashore in New Zealand. This poor Emperor Penguin mistook sand for snow and ended up getting quite sick.

Please click the link to go to the article. It is from a website that offers articles for kids in grades 1-8. It is the bomb-diggidey!

So, before reading the article together on the Smart board, I activated prior knowledge by using a circle map. It was fun, different and very interesting for the kids to use.

Click the picture for the document.

Then, I gave the kids a chance to share. I have been REALLY working on this-it always seems to be the step that gets left out...

After kids shared their schema, they were given a copy of the article and another chart. We had used S-W-B-S-T for fiction, but the kids didn't think this would work so well for nonfiction. Hence, the next graphic organizer...which you can click here to access.

This was done over a few days. We have also talked about the fact that a summary shouldn't include your opinion, and that it is really important to know the author's purpose before deciding how to go about writing a summary. 

As a link to IR, I gave each students a sticky note and asked them to write down what the author's purpose was, whether the text was fiction or nonfiction, and which go chart they would  use to  help organize their thinking...