MINILESSON Access Prior Knowledge About Your Topic Before Reading CONNECTION Launch a class research study. Rally students to become botanists and learn all they can about plants.
“Readers, gather close. I’m incredibly excited, because today we’ll start researching a new topic together: plants. Do you know there are plant scientists all around the world who study plants? That’s because you can find plants everywhere in the world where people live. Right now, tell your partner about some of the plants you can find right outside our school.” Listen as students talk. “What’s cool is that you can also find plants in places where people don’t usually live, like high on mountains, buried under the snow in the Arctic, and even underwater in the ocean. “There are so many different kinds of plants. Plant scientists have found almost 400,000 different kinds of plants. Can you believe it? And almost 140,000 of those plants are super rare, plants that scientists have seen five or less times EVER. “And plants do so many important things. Plants give us many of the foods that we eat. Plants release the oxygen we need to breathe. There are even plants like bamboo that can keep islands in India from getting swept away during powerful storms. “Plant scientists have a special name. They’re called botanists . In this unit, we’ll be bota- nists, studying plants and learning weird and wonderful things about plants and their habitats. You and a small group of readers will each explore a particular topic related to plants, becoming experts on that topic so you can teach others about it. “As you learn about your specific plant topic, you’ll also learn more about how to study any topic. Later in this unit, you can use your new research tools and strategies to explore a topic you choose.” Name the teaching point. “Today I want to teach you that whenever you study a new topic, it helps to bring to the front of your mind everything you already know about the topic. Then you can see how things you learn fit with things you already know—and you might change what you thought you knew!” TEACHING Recruit students to help you list things you already know about plants. Jot the ideas they suggest on sticky notes. “A concept map is a special tool that helps you remember and organize everything you know about a topic. When you make a concept map, you write the big topic you’re learning about in the center, and then around it, you put things you think you already know about that topic.” Display a concept map with plants written in a circle in the middle. “To start, we can ask, ‘What do we already know about plants?’ List a few things you already know across your fingers. “Now, turn to your partner and share something you already know about plants. I’ll listen and jot the ideas you suggest.” As partners talk, jot notes on sticky notes. Begin to categorize the ideas you and your students have listed, demonstrating how you group similar ideas together and label their connections.
This is a reference to The Forest Keeper: The True Story of Jadav Payeng , which students will hear during read-aloud and close reading time.
To support your MLL stu- dents with vocabulary acquisi- tion, when you introduce a word like botanist , it is helpful to have students say the word after you, part by part, focusing a moment on pronunciation. You may also want to write the word and show a picture so students can develop comprehensible input about the word being taught. When students begin studying a new topic, knowledge activation is key. Alvarez and Risko (1993) suggest that one way students can activate knowledge is by creating hierarchical concept maps, with a topic in the center, and categories of information that are related underneath it. Students might use words like has , such as , causes , needs , includes and for example to link concepts (Anderson-Inman & Zeitz, 1994).
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Bend I • Strengthen Nonfiction Research Skills: Researching Plants
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