Publishing Non-Fiction

One of the features of the new Common Core Standards in English and Language Arts is the increased use of non-fiction in reading and writing. I have known for years that the vast majority of required reading as an adult is non-fiction. Including non-fiction in classroom reading has been on the increase for several years, at least in schools in which I have been involved. So including non-fiction reading and writing has been a given with Joy.

The books above are from a series published by Capstone Press. I chose them to be some of Joy's first non-fiction reading because they are interesting and filled with great pictures. There are more in the series, too! As we have read them, I realized they are very patterned from book to book. The picture to the right shows the second section of each book, which is always about the young. Once I realized the books were so patterned, I decided it would be a great non-fiction writing project to write one of our own books in the series!

 Joy, of course, chose to write about puffins. They are still the animal which catches her attention these days. Here is her first page on puffins. You can compare it to the first page of the book on ducks below.

It's easy to see the pattern of this first page, and it was easy for Joy to see it, too. As we wrote each page for the book on puffins, we read the corresponding page in each of the other books in the series. We discussed the patterns found: the information and the sentences. The structure really helped Joy to formulate her own thoughts

about puffins.

Joy has been learning to keyboard using Dance Mat Typing, a terrific online, free program with lots of interesting characters. The puffin book was the first writing project that I had Joy type for herself. She was able to do most of the writing herself. I also used the opportunity to teach her about spell check; she was able to proofread with some help.

In each of the books in the series, there is a pictorial time line of the animal from birth/hatching to adulthood. We made one, too, but couldn't get the graphics to work exactly the same. Joy learned a lot about graphic work on this page! You can see our version close-up below.

Another thing that Joy learned about in this project is finding and using pictures from the internet. We did not cite them; I was more interested in helping her learn how to search for images and manipulate them. We will being citations in first grade, I think.

All in all, this was a fun and interesting project for Joy. She loved her final product, which is now on her bookshelf as a book she can read! She reads to her daddy nightly as part of her "homework," and this is one of her favorite reads.