Batty Week Guided Reading with a Purpose Fact or Opinion

We just finished up our bat week and we had so much fun. We also learned a lot too! These are the 5 stories we read this week. All about Bats is a digital book that I project. There is also a paper mini book for kids too.  
Batty Week Guided Reading with a Purpose Fact or Opinion | First Grade Roars
The focus for the week is the difference between a fact and an opinion. We also reviewed fiction and non-fiction stories as we read both.   Whenever I’m teaching non-fiction, I like to use some sort of interactive anchor chart. I am going to share pictures from the previous years below and then discuss the one we used this year. 
This is the KWL chart from last year!
Here is a can, have and are chart as well as a schema char that I have used in the past. 

This is the chart I decided to use this year. One area our students are struggling on is asking questions. I thought a KWL chart would be the perfect chart to help us build our questioning skills.
Here is a before and after.
We started by all creating our own schema on a worksheet I passed out. Then we added our batty schema to the “What I Know” part-blue sticky notes. Next we tried to think of questions we wanted to know about bats. The struggle was real and I decided we needed something to help guide us. I quickly wrote the question words on notecards to help us. Someone on Instagram also suggested saying “I wonder”. Since it seemed to be working for my kiddos, I made the cards a little cuter. You can grab them for free here: Question Word Cards Freebie
Finally we added “What we Learned” in purple. Everyday we visited this chart and added to it.  The little orange sticky notes on the yellow questions are the answers to our questions. Once we found the answers, we added them to the chart. 

Here are a few examples of worksheets we completed. We practiced fact and opinion in many ways all week long. 
Here are my posters I kept up all week for fact and opinion. We also completed a few sorting activities too. 
We compared bats to birds after reading Stellaluna. Not only did we sort the differences between bats and birds but we also did a fun group project. I gave 5 groups chart paper and cards and they created their own posters. Of course I forgot to take pictures. They loved working together in groups and making posters.
Here is my version… there’s is much cuter.
As an assessment, we completed these fact versus opinion bats. You can see ours below in the black. We also made the other cute bats just for fun!
 I kind of forgot to print the head so we made do and used the body as the head…
I try to get them excited about the learning too by doing extra little things.  I dressed up in my batty clothes, I wore a batty headband, and I used a dollar store table cloth to make this bat cave entrance. 
This hung over our doorway for the week. I just pulled it to the side when we going in and out.
We also made this fun sock bats. I invited parent helpers to come in and make this project with us. It requires a glue gun so I wanted as many adults helpers as possible. The students all sent in 1 old black sock. Then I received 3 bags of stuffing from parent donations. I have a class of 24 and we probably only needed 2 big bags. The students cut out the wings and ears and fangs. First they stuffed the socks with stuffing. Then we tied them shut with black yarn. Finally, the parent helper glued on their wings, ears, google eyes and a red yarn mouth with fangs. Last year I hung them in my reading center and kept them there the entire year. The children were anxious to take them home so this year I just hung them by the window. 

They always turn out so cute and it only took us about 45 minutes from start to finish with 4 parent helpers. I have done this by myself too. We just worked on them throughout the day when I had a chance.  GRAB THE WING PATTERN HERE
Finally on the last day, we dressed in black and brought our flashlights for some reading in the dark.  The kids looked forward to this all day and they really enjoyed it.

Megan

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Hello!

I’m Megan, a first grade teacher and a mother to 7 amazing children. I love to create and collaborate with teachers. When I’m not teaching, I love spending time with my family, baking and playing tennis.

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