Animal Books: Informative Writing

I love teaching informative writing! We end up teaching it in the middle of the year, so my students are starting to become fairly independent writers. It's one of my favorite units because we get to write about animals--lots of different animals!!! We start by writing an informative paragraph together with lots of modeling! Then, my students get to write a paragraph independently. Finally, the real fun begins! I let my students choose from three animals. We do this a couple of times and they love it!! With my faster students, I have them choose another animal of the three to write about before moving on to the next set of animals. My students love the choice and I love that there is a lot of flexibility on pacing for me. 

We also incorporate research heavily into this unit. Our grade level team has been purchasing a lot of the National Geographic Kids animal books. We mostly use these to teach from now. But I've also used their website, too. I also found this website that lists almost every animal my students can think of! Toward the end of the unit, I let my students choose any animal to write about. This is the website I teach them to use to find information about their animal!

Are you ready for the best part, though? We practice publishing a lot in this unit. After students edit, they type up their final drafts (sometimes with a little help.) Then we print the page and they illustrate it with that animal. I keep all of their animals until we are almost done with the informative writing unit.

In past years, I went beyond this and had students make their table of contents. I modeled it heavily and we did it together as a group. For my higher students, I had them create a glossary with some of the vocabulary words they learned in this unit (diet, habitat, etc.). This year, we moved into typing on the chromebooks, so I didn't do either the table of contents or glossaries this time. 

At last, the students each make a cover featuring all of the animals they wrote about. Some students have more animals than others, but it's OK. Then I laminate them all and bind each student's work into a book! Their faces light up when they realize that they are published authors! This project is so much fun! Snag your own Informative Animal Book here!