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Non-Fiction All-About Books

Our class finished creating All-About books right before Christmas Break.  They loved writing these books, so much so, that I'm having a hard time transitioning them back to narrative writing.  Today we talked about how writers need to know about different topics in order to make their stories believable.  So, I'm trying to connect what we are doing now to the work they did in their All-About book.  For example, one of my students did an All-About book about mummies.  So, I used that as an example to the group to show them that he could write a story about someone who saw a mummy at a museum.  But, in order to make that story believable, he would need to use some facts he knows about mummies in his story. The point being that you can write stories about small moments in time but you need to use some factual information in order to make your stories make sense to the reader.  When we worked on our All-About books, we also read non-fiction books during reading workshop.  I created an All-About Book template for the kids to write on and anchor charts to go with each of the pages.  Here are the anchor charts that I made up to go with the non-fiction unit, using The Teacher's College as a guide.  We used the charts in both reading workshop and writing workshop.



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