Writing: Non-Fiction

Next week, students will begin learning to write their own non-fiction, informative texts.Students will learn to write informational texts that teach others interesting and important information and ideas about a topic.

You can help your child with this by reading non-fiction books at home. This will help familiarize your child with the organization of non-fiction, informative texts, and help them learn about topics they may want to write about. They will feel more confident about coming up with ideas to write about, and having ideas they want to share and communicate to the world. Let your child have fun and get excited for choosing books about topics that really interest them. Engage their natural curiosity and wonder.

Try and choose books that include a table of contents, a glossary, bold words, pictures, and diagrams.

National Geographic offers great options. We would love some donations to use in our class, too! :) If you  need help choosing a good level for your child, please read my post on choosing good-fit books, or email me.

Questions you can ask your child:
- Ask your child to use the table of contents to find information in the book. 
- Ask them to use the glossary to learn what new words mean. 
- Ask them why some words are bold. 
- Ask your child why they think the author wrote this book.
- Ask them to explain what a diagram is teaching them. 
- Ask them what they know about a topic, prior to reading a book, what they wonder, or have questions about the topic, and what they learned after reading it. This is also called a "KWL" chart (see example below. Your child is familiar with this way of thinking.

Help your child to notice facts, and even jot down notes about their favorite facts, or their opinions on what they have read.

This is the Kindergarten checklist for informative writing, from which we are growing from.

Students are also learning to re-read what they write, pointing to the words as they go. We want them to notice when something doesn't make sense. We want them to capitalize the beginning of sentences, and use appropriate punctuation at the end of sentences. We want them to spell words to the best of their abilities, saying a word out loud and stretching it out to hear each sound in the word. We want them to use their word wall, or a dictionary as a resource for looking up and spelling words. I highly suggest getting a picture dictionary for your child to use at home.

You can read more about non-fiction text features on my post about Making and Confirming Predictions.

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