Lots of Wondering
My first graders are so excited about our new genre study. We’ve been reading lots of nonfiction and they have so many questions. After reading Flip the Flaps: Animal Homes on Tuesday, I gave the kids time to ask their own questions. Each child was given several index cards to write their wonderings. Their questions covered so many topics like: How high can a dragonfly fly? How did God make people? Why does a rainbow come out when it rains? How does electricity work? One of my emerging writers drew a picture of a dragonfly to help him remember his question. A is just beginning to string letters together that represent the sounds in words. He copied 2 wonder words from the chart (how and why) and the word dragonfly (another student had asked for that word to be put on the chart) and then turned the card over and drew a rudimentary bug to represent a dragonfly. When he shared, I told the class how smart he was to draw a picture to help him remember what he was wondering. As soon as I said that, several others started to draw pictures to support their questions. It is very important to me that each student in my room feels his work is honored, from the very beginning writers to those whose work is more conventially written. Each student made an “I Wonder” envelope in which to keep his or her questions. I got this idea from Debbie Miller’s Reading with Meaning (she used Wonder Boxes). The students will continue to add to their envelopes and we will use these questions to guide their research.
Our next step was to begin to organize the wide variety of informational books we have in our room. Early the next day before the students came in, I strategically grouped informational books together for students to categorize. Each pile had a few books in several categories. My mini-lesson focused on looking through a pile of books and deciding what the book was mainly about. The students are familiar with the labeled book baskets in our classroom library, so it was easy to make the connection by thinking about what kind of label we might put on different piles. The students worked in small groups of 2 or 3 to sort their pile of books. The conversations were amazing. C looked at the book The Wild Side of Pet Cats. First he thought it would be about pet cats, but as he looked through the photographs, he decided that it wasn’t really about pets. It was more about cats that live in the wild. Conversations like this were happening all around the room! After the kids had time to sort their books, we gathered again in the meeting area to create our baskets. Again, there was a lot of thoughful conversation in the group. I am always amazed at what six year olds can do when you give them the opportunity!
Our final step was to make labels for each of the baskets. We decided that our labels should have the words as well as a pictures for each category. I am going in early tomorrow morning to attach the labels so that we can put the baskets in our classroom library. 
