Monday Made It - Reading with Zoobooks!

It's that time again, Monday Made It with Tara at 4th Grade Frolics!

My first Made It I started working on about a year ago. I actually thought I had finished it over the summer until I went to pull it out a couple weeks ago, and realized it never got done. Those two snow days last week were just what I needed to put the finishing touches on my Nonfiction Reading Unit using Zoobooks.

When I started the nonfiction reading unit last year, I soon saw that my students needed more common experiences with the strategies before I would be able to let them loose to explore all different types of nonfiction. The problem was I don't have a whole set of any nonfiction books for us to use, but what I did have was tons of Zoobooks. And the library had even more! I found that I could introduce and model strategies and teaching points using the Zoobooks and even made a couple class sets of copies (shhh!) so we could all truly be on the same page. Then the students were able to practice with a partner and on their own using the same Zoobook and then different ones of their choosing.

Two weeks ago, I asked the librarian to round up as many Zoobooks as she could and put them on shelves in the classroom but told the students they couldn't check them out yet. Hardly a day would go by without a student asking, "Can we check those out yet?". Last week when I finally told the class we were ready to begin our nonfiction unit and they would be able to start reading them, the response was, "Yes!".

Here the students were practicing the first steps of reading nonfiction with a partner...preview, predict, and accessing prior knowledge.

Once we were to the reading workshop portion of the lesson, the students no longer had to record their thinking in the packet, but I told them I wanted to be able to tell they were stopping and thinking. I wanted to see them referring to the Reading Workshop Mini Poster, which I displayed using PowerPoint on my projector.

I loved seeing all my "thinkers" around the room, hands on chins and all! You can find my Nonfiction Reading Unit using Zoobooks at my TPT Store. To celebrate finally finishing this huge 86 page bundle, I'm selling it for 50% off in a special Monday Made It Markdown for 48 hours!

I have also provided a link below if you'd like to see about getting some more Zoobooks for your collection!

My second Made It was inspired by some videos I saw on the Random Acts of Kindness website. You can visit it by clicking here.

This week is Random Acts of Kindness Week, so I decided to start a random acts of kindness initiative in my classroom. I showed my students this video from Youtube...

called Kindness Boomerang. Then we watched one of the videos from the Random Acts of Kindness website. We talked about doing nice things for other people that you don't normally do and that you weren't asked to do. Each time they do something for someone, they fill out one of these slips...

which are found here on our marker board...

When they have done three of them, they staple them together, turn them in to me, and then they get to make a heart to hang in our classroom. Click on the picture below to be taken to the easy directions on making these hearts.