Informational Writing in First and Second Grade
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I'll never forget my first year of teaching. It was thrilling, exciting, exhausting, and I always felt a little like I was drowning. One of the first colleagues to throw me a supportive line was Karen Roberts. She is the one who told me that a running record was a reading assessment and didn't actually have anything to do with track. Then she showed me how to administer one and taught me what to do with the results. Fifteen years later I am still learning from her and thought you might like to as well.
Karen works with first and second graders this year. They are currently learning about the Rainforest and working on informational writing. She has a way of scaffolding and supporting her early writers that helps them gather and organize information without copying sentence after sentence from a book.
Students gather tidbits of information in four categories. Karen models explicitly and students refer to her sample as well as the reference poster hanging in the room.
Students get four sticky notes on a white sheet of paper. On the yellow note, they record information about what their chosen animal looks like. On the blue they record information about what it eats. On green, they record information regarding its enemies. On pink, the students record interesting and fun facts about their animal.
Once the note taking is complete, students use the nuggets of information they've gathered, transferring them to complete sentences in an All About book.
Here is a link to the book template. We left it as a word document so you can change the topic to one your students may be interested in studying.
