After we knew what an "All About" book had to look like, we began planning our own book. In Social Studies we are studying New York City - so our writing will be about New York City as well!
Our class is creating an "All About" book about City Parks. We brainstormed titles and chapters for our book. But since there are 22 of us - we ended up with a LOT of different chapters! We wrote our chapter ideas on Post-It Notes and began to work together. For the next two days we debated how to organize all of our chapters into four inclusive chapters.
Should people's bug chapters go with the other animal Post-It Notes? Or should it go with the plants, grass, and dirt Post-It Notes since that's where bugs live? Or should they be their own chapter?
The debate was wonderful! We quickly learned that speaking louder or chanting our opinions did nothing to convince people - only by using our ideas could we change someone's mind. We eventually got everyone's post-it notes into four groups and named our chapters:
1. Animals We See in Parks
2. Bugs and Nature You See in Parks
3. People in the Parks
4. Things We Use in the Park
Now that we have our chapters, we need to start the research! Our first resource when researching is people - through both interviews and our own experiences we know a lot already! We listed those ideas first. Then we began reading lots of books, looking at maps, and viewing pictures to learn even more about our chapters! We are now using webs to write sentences about our chapter titles in research groups.
One student's web for Chapter Three:
We will continue reading and researching on Monday. Once we have lots of ideas, our group will need to start organizing them into paragraphs for the book's chapter. Then we'll write, revise, edit, illustrate, and publish our chapter to be put into our large class book!
Of course, this "All-About" book is simply practice for our own "All About" book writing in a few weeks. We will be researching and writing about the transportation, monuments, buildings, bridges, and tunnels in New York City. Resources have already begun being collected and hopefully some walking trips in the city will add to our experiences to help us in our writing.
When our "All About" books are done, we will celebrate our writing with a publishing party. Once a date and time has been set, invitations will be sent out to families.
Updates on our book about New York City Parks will be coming over the next few weeks! So be sure to check back!
