Dust Cover Dilemma?

I take the dust covers off of my books that are in the classroom library so I have accummulated a huge stack of them in a cupboard.  I was setting up my Focus Board for our new unit and I decided to use the book jackets to enhance the board. Since we are starting biography book clubs and studying nonfiction narrative books, I chose books suited to those two areas.

I hot glued them onto a map holder that is above the board.

 



Repurposing Those Old, Boring Textbooks

My school had some old Social Studies big books and Open Court textbooks that were being sent away for disposal. I snatched them and repurposed them for a nonfiction text feature lesson!  I set it up like a scavenger hunt. The students had a list of features. They worked in cooperative groups to cut out the examples, label them, and write a short description. They glued everything down on large pieces of butcher paper and we hung them up as an anchor chart during our Navigating Through Nonfiction unit.

This activity is easily differentiated for students at- or above- grade level and for those students below-grade level or who have a disability of some sort. The work sample above is the average or above-average group. They did the entire activity on their own. 

The work sample below was completed by a group of exceptional needs students with learning disabilities. I had the descriptions pre-written and cut out for them.  I also had the text features already cut out. They had to match the descriptions to the examples and glue them down.

Lapbooking

I was on Pinterest the other day and I came across something called lapbooking on a homeschooling site.  I had never heard of it before and I checked it out because it had a very visual element that I know students will appreciate.  Students make mini-books about elements that are related to a common topic. Then they arrange all of the mini-books into a display of one large lapbook. There are a number of websites that can give ideas for lapbooking--just Google it.  Many of the sites give photo examples and also templates for making the mini-books.

This is the lapbook my students are making this week as a way to review the reading stragegies they have learned this year. I spent class time demonstrating how to make the individual minibooks.  Then I made the lapbook a center this week so the students could write the information inside the minibooks during their worktime.

This is a note from the mom of one of my students: