Shared Research and Writing Projects!

We are starting our Shared Research and Writing Projects!  Yeah!  I am so excited about this new project.  I have never done a "full-blown" research project with my firsties before.  I know they are going to LOVE it.  

We have 6 first grade teachers at my school (including me).  We always do a great job of planning together and are a pretty tight-knit group.  We are tackling this research project together and we are SUPER excited!  

Each teacher is doing a different group of animals with their classes.  I am doing woodland animals, one teacher is doing safari/zoo animals, one - ocean animals, rain forest animals, farm animals and polar/arctic animals.  We have giving ourselves about a month to complete and will invite our parents one night at the completion to share and enjoy our hard work.  We are opening up all 6 classrooms for parents and students to be able to go around and see everyone's projects.  Our principal is pretty psyched about it too!

I was recently contacted by a great teacher in Minnesota and was asked to put together a research project for her first graders.  I was very shocked and humbled but jumped at the opportunity to put something together for her.  The following two units came out of this:

    

(If you would like to see more of these 2 units - just click on the pics above)

I plan on making separate units for all the rest of the animal groups but this will have to be a summer project. :)  

We've briefly talked about the project and they know we are doing them over Woodland Animals.  But before we just dive in, we are spending quite a bit of time talking about Nonfiction text features. 

I am using the following books as my examples:

I have taken the frog life cycle book and copied pages to make an anchor chart with text feature examples and definitions.  (I will try and post pics when we complete the chart together)  We are spending a lot of time on the following:

*Title Page

*Table of Contents

*Headers

*Labeling

*Diagrams and Captions

*Glossary

*Index

I plan to post more about our journey through our research and hopefully provide lots of pics!

Thanks for stopping by and keep checking back to see our progress!

Have a great week!