Our students started thinking about mammals by "pair & sharing" their facts. We then shared out a few facts with the whole group. The amount of background knowledge they had was super impressive! Some facts we came up with: - mammals have babies - have fur or hair - platypus are mammals - people are mammals - turtles are not mammals because they are reptiles - frogs are not mammals because they are amphibians
We then talked about what each student wanted to learn about mammals and who they wanted to share this new information with. - Why do some mammals have tails and others don’t? - What do they eat? - How come some mammals kill other mammals?
We had each student write the name of the person they were going to share the information with on the top corner of their research paper to make the idea of audience concrete in their minds during the writing process.
Finally, we watched the video below as a class to learn new information about mammals!
While I read this book aloud to the class, they filled in their graphic organizers with the information. We usually stopped and talked about the information after the students realized we had gotten to a fact that should be in our organizer. This also allowed time for the students to catch up and write the facts. The note-taking was also where students needed the most scaffolding. It was very difficult for a few of them to keep up, which is why a co-teaching model worked great in this situation. While I read, my co-teacher sat at a kidney table with the students who needed reminders about what they were writing or needed assistance actually writing (she did a lot of scribing for our students with significant memory problems).