Topic Sentences and Owls!!

Happy Wednesday everyone! I am popping on the blog tonight to share with you how we are working our way through writing topic sentences this week.

This month kind of snuck up on us. We realized this week that if we didn’t start our spider projects next week, we would run out of time. SOOOO, that meant that we needed to make sure we taught them topic sentences THIS week. Well, I already had this week planned….insert quick lesson plan change.

Now, we are working on topic sentences. We started with this anchor chart and the book Meerkats.

We looked at the topic sentences of different sections of the text. Then, the kiddos brainstormed what they thought they were going to learn about based on that topic sentence. Next, I typed up some topic sentences from different books and placed them around the room. We used the same routine we use for observation charts. The kiddos worked in partners and went around to each poster and wrote what they thought they would learn about based on the topic sentences.

This gave them experiences with different types of topic sentences. I tried to include different types of sentences on the charts. I had five different charts in total. When they finished, we went through them and discussed what they observed. We talked about the key words that helped us know what we would be learning about and how those key words acted like clues.

For our next lesson, as a group, we read a book about bears. We found facts that we thought were interesting and wrote them on a chart. Which, of course, I forgot to take a picture of. Once we had our facts, we created a topic sentence. BUT, they found that one of their facts didn’t fit the topic sentence. Two facts were about what bears do and one was about the color of their fur. HELLO teaching moment. That led to the discussion about our facts and how they need to be about the SAME thing.

Today, we put our focus on owls. They worked in partners to find facts about owls. We used different leveled passages about owls. The passages ranged in levels and allowed the kiddos to access the information they needed at their level. We used Owls! and Hoot! Hoot! Hoot, Owls!

They also got to use highlighters! You would have thought it was Christmas!!!

After we found our facts, we came back together as a class. We went through our facts and worked on finding three facts that went together. Then, we created a topic sentence.

The kiddos wrote down their topic sentence and facts on their paper. Here is what it looked like…

I wish I had a picture of a students’ copy but they took them home and I totally forgot to take one before they left!!

We are going to repeat the process tomorrow, but with a book. After tomorrow, they are going to start creating topic sentences independently. I wanted to make sure to give them enough experiences creating topic sentences with a partner before we moved on to doing them independently. After we master the creation of a topic sentence, we will start working on a conclusion.

I hope that you all have a fabulous rest of your week:)