I finished my nonfiction unit last night! We tested a few of the activities out in my classroom today. The students did really well with these activities and appreciated the opportunity to be nonfiction detectives.
I started by making sure I had a new binder for it (of course!) I have a binder for everything! Then, I simply printed the cover of the unit out and sleeved it into my one-inch binder. Then, I hole-punched the rest of the unit to keep organized for whenever I need to pull passages for students to practice with.
To save paper, copy these front and back when you’re making a class set, but I didn’t have the chance when I was printing from my home computer.
Sorting Fiction and Nonfiction
Then, we did the fiction/nonfiction sort. This is at the beginning of my Nonfiction Comprehension set. I suggest doing this activity before you dive into the practice passages. This will help them get a firm grasp on what to expect when reading these texts.
Each student found two books in the classroom library and wrote them on our classroom sort. Then, they copied at least ten of the nonfiction titles onto their paper.
Nonfiction Detectives
We are searching through our nonfiction books and looking for text features we have learned about so far. Students would stand if their books had different text features in them as I called them out. They found that not all nonfiction books have every single text feature. Then we had a mini-quiz on text features (also found in the product).
This was a very engaging activity that I knew would help the students understand the types of images and text they’d be finding in these texts and passages they’d be reading in the future. For more nonfiction fun, check out this post on compare and contrast.
Nonfiction Comprehension Product
If you’re interested in this product, check it out for sale in my TPT store!
