Nonfiction and KWL Charts

As we prepare for our space unit research, I had students work with a nonfiction text about cheetahs. I know I have a lot of students whose favorite animal is the cheetah so I picked it to keep interest and excitement up.

The first thing students and I worked on was creating a KWL chart. K is what we already know about cheetahs, W is what we want to know, and L would be what we learned after doing the research. As one would think, the class already knew plenty of information about cheetahs and was able to add quite a bit of facts to the K portion of our graphic organizer. When it came to the W however, they were a little more reserved considering they thought they already knew everything they had to know about the animal. With a little encouragement and questions from myself and Mrs. Turgeon, our classroom educational technician, questions were soon bursting out of them though. 

Finally, students were presented with a two page article on cheetahs and were asked to collect any new information we didn't already have under the K and W. They would add that information to the L section. Students could work independently, with a partner, or as a whole group on this task. In the end, they were so excited because they found so many new facts and confirmation of the facts they already knew. Most importantly, Sam was really excited because he found a fact that proved one of our K facts wrong and we had to go back and fix our chart!

In the end, our class decided it is important to organize nonfiction information and research using a KWL chart because it shows us those things we know and helps us to really focus on what we need to find out and where to get it. After we completed this first article and our L section, students crossed of questions in the W section that had been answered and made a plan to go look in other sources for questions we had and still hadn't answered yet. Yay for learning!!