Animal Research - Part 9

In our last blog posting (Part 8), students learned to expand their habitat notes into complete sentences to make a paragraph.

Today, we followed the same process using our green notes on our animals' diets. On the left are my notes in the order I thought gave them the best flow. On the right, you'll see the paragraph I wrote from my notes. I highlighted where my notes appeared in my paragraph so students could see the relationship between the two pieces and that I had to use my own brain and words to expand my notes. You'll also notice I taught students to carry over the resource code to give credit for where each of our ideas come from.

Before I set them loose to practice the process themselves, we watched the clip I took yesterday as they drafted their habitat paragraphs. I told them how impressed I was at how focused everyone was! We noticed how everyone was on task, no one was talking, kids were looking back and forth from their notes to their notebook, kids were rereading, the list went on! I think this technique of having students watch themselves truly inspires them to be the best writers they can be.

Here are some still shots of students drafting their diet paragraphs:

And here's a clip of what they looked and sounded like as they drafted today! I was proud, once again, of their work today!

Here's the paragraph one of my kiddo's wrote about the diet of a polar bear!

Students followed this same process for drafting their defense mechanism paragraphs! In our next lesson (Part 10), we will write our introductions to our reports. Visit my TpT site if you're interested in getting all the student sheets used in this animal research unit.