My Adventures in Teaching: First Grade Language Arts Unit: Bats

In the first day of this two-lesson unit, I read an informational text Bats by Carolyn MacLulich to a First Grade class that I was working with for a class assignment. Before reading the text, we used a KLW chart and discussed "What I think I know about bats." I was really surprised by how much the students already knew about bats. One student said that bats use echolocation and another said that bats are nocturnal! During the reading, I instructed students to be thinking about new information that they were learning so that we could put it in the KLW chart. As I read, I modeled how to use the pictures and mine the text for information.
In the second lesson, we reviewed as a class what we had learned from the bats book in the previous day's lesson. Again, this group really surprised me. I didn't even have to bring out the KLW chart because they remembered everything! After we reviewed the information, we brainstormed as a class different ways to start sentences to share what we learned. For example, "One thing I learned was..." or "I never knew that..." Then I modeled how to use the information from the text to complete the sentences. I told students that they could write anything they wanted to, but that it should be something about bats that they learned from the book. Some of the students really got into this activity and wrote pages! As I said before, I was really impressed with this first grade class. Luckily, I thought ahead and took some pictures of their work and the KLW chart.