Response to Literature

Throughout the month of April our class has been learning about narrative nonfiction and working on writing in response to literature. During the winter we spent several months focused on learning about informational nonfiction texts ("all about" books with information on a topic and books filled with facts) and have now shifted our focus to narrative nonfiction, which the kids describe as "true stories," or nonfiction texts that read like a story rather than a book filled with facts.

At the same time we have started working on writing responses to these new books, rather than just discussing our thinking about them. This is something students will be doing more and more of as they move on in their school years. Each week this month our class focused on a different narrative nonfiction book, writing different types of responses to it each day. Some of these include asking the "w" questions, "who, when, where" as well as deeper questions such as "what was the main idea of this story," "what were some supporting details," and "why do you think the author wrote this book?" We have written predictions about what might be coming up in a book followed by our answers about what ended up happening, and we have also started writing about character. We are learning about character feelings, character traits, and how to find evidence in the text to support them. For example, if students wrote that a character was sad or a character was curious, they would then have to find evidence in the text to prove that the character was sad or curious. Finding evidence to support our conclusions and being able to adequately answer the question, "how do you know?" is a large part of the new Common Core State Standards. Response to literature is one way that students are beginning to work on this skill in first grade! You will see some response to literature sheets from this and last week's work coming home today.