One of my favourite resources this school year has been Newsela, a website that provides a variety of non-fiction articles and the ability to adapt them to various Lexile scores (reading levels). Through Newsela I have found a number of articles that have directed related to our units of inquiry, and provided natural connections to real world topics and events.
Currently, we are looking at informative writing and our sharing the planet unit of inquiry. Today, I selected a Newela article on starfish that were dying in the Pacific Ocean. As our focus has been on informative writing, the students were using their ‘informative writing checklist’ to analyze the article and identify the strategies the author had utilized. This is a fairly standard learning activity that we have done before but today I got an interesting response after the lesson.
One student noticed that through that activity we had utilized our reading strategies (while reading the article, making predictions, etc.), our writing strategies by identify strategies the author gad utilize, and our inquiry skills as they were thinking about how the unit connected to our unity of inquiry and concepts! For me, that the student was able to articulate the different learning skills they were using was evidence that they are developing as learners!