NONFICTION LITERACY in Kindergarten: Young students incorporate text features into their science notebooks*

As my kindergarteners walked among the large trees near our school field on a delightful fall day, students commented on the size, shape, color, and texture of the leaves they collected.

 

They compared their leaves to their classmates’ and considered what made their leaves interesting and unique. Each student was given a magnifying glass to “zoom in” on the details of their leaves and many felt transformed into scientists at that moment.

We returned to the classroom, each child holding a “special leaf,” and they opened their science notebooks to a blank page. I asked the students to capture the leaf on the page and to consider the many details they had noticed outside. The students used their crayons and blended colors to get just the right color for the leaf.

They paid attention to the size of the leaf and compared the actual leaves to their drawings, making adjustments as necessary. The kindergarten students noticed details like holes, tears, and veining in their leaves (Figure 1). I reminded them to zoom-in with their magnifying glasses,
a technique that we had used when looking for specific features in the text of nonfiction or informational books.

During nonfiction literacy lessons, the students had been exposed to different text features in informational books and learned that with nonfiction, you often needed to zoom-in to notice the details held in diagrams, photographs, and captions. This “capturing a leaf task” was a typical exercise in a school year spent introducing students to nonfiction text features and science notebooks.

The overall focus of the notebooks was for students to capture what we did in science and record this in some way so that what they did and what they learned or wondered about could be communicated. (This article summary only, to get the full text please visit http://www.proquest.co.uk/ or contact admin web)

*Janice Novakowski (jnovakowski@sd38.bc.ca) is a primary teacher and curriculum coordinator for the Richmond School District in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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