Fun Friday – Informational Text

Last week I offered our last “Fun Friday” program of the year.  We started this brand-new program in January. Because once a month our elementary school students have a half day of school.  Geared toward kids in 1st – 4th grades, 25 students descend on the library from 2:00 – 2:45pm for a program with a different theme each month.  In the past year, we’ve done shaving cream puffy paint snowflakes, poetry, gardening, spies and secret codes, STEM programming. This month’s theme is informational text (in a really fun way!) of course.

How Animals Sleep

I planned this program from the information I received from a workshop done by a librarian from the  Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, PA.  They do some amazing outreach in the schools, and a lot of what they offer can be found online!  Super helpful!  As for this program, my goal was to give kids the chance to get comfortable with some informational text, learn some neat facts, and have fun!  I focused this program on three parts.  In the first part, I read aloud the book Time to Sleep by Steve Jenkins.  Jenkins does some amazing informational text for young children in a really cool way. 

So we started out sharing this book together and we made a list of the animals we had heard about before and animals that were new to us!  The kids loved learning about how different animals sleep – especially the parrotfish which sleep in a bag of mucus to hide their scent.

KWL Chart

In the second part of the program, we created a KWL chart all about polar bears.  If you’re unfamiliar with a KWL chart it’s a three-column chart. The first column is What We “Know”, the second is What We “WANT” to know, and the third is What We “LEARNED.”  So we first talked about what we already knew about polar bears. Then I asked the kids what they wanted to know about polar bears. And finally, I offered the kids a variety of informational texts on polar bears.  This was helpful because the kids were at a variety of reading levels. It helped to have very basic and more complex books to fit the kids’ needs. 

I love the Scholastic “A True Book” series for this reason. -They are great informational texts and relatively easy to read for beginning readers.  After the kids had time to look through their books, everyone got the chance to share what they had learned about polar bears.

True/False Statements

And finally, our third part of the program was a True/False test about penguins.  I read aloud 6 different statements about penguins. Then I asked the kids to take an educated guess. To carefully think whether they believed the statements were true or false.  Then I let them loose with a new stack of books and they could vote whether or not they found the facts to support the statements.  The kids all had a great time and I think they learned some cool new facts about some winter animals. 

My only wish was I had enough time to teach them more about looking for information in books. For example, using a table of contents, an index, and a glossary but that’s for another day!