Technical Texts

In our second trimester we are learning about technical texts. Technical texts are texts that don't read like a story.  Technical texts can be informational books, recipes, charts, graphs, timelines, directions, magazines, or articles.  We have been creating our own technical texts by making science notebooks.  The writing we do in our science notebook is all true and factual and we add detail to our notebooks, not by adding more words, but by adding charts or diagrams.  We have enjoyed writing in our science notebooks because we can use bullets, numbers, and we don't always need complete sentences.  Check out these examples of science notebooks.

We respond to reading every day.  We can tell what happened in the story, and we have been learning to dig deeper into our reponses by adding what we liked or didn't like, or how it connects to our own lives.  The first graders today had fun responding because one of our characters wet his pants- everyone seemed to agree that that would be fun to write about.  We also had lots of personal connections to that experience... (as I'm sure you can imagine), which we wrote about too.

Another example of a technical text is a news magazine.  We have been reading Time for Kids all year, but today the first graders were delighed to see that I ordered Lego Magazine for them.  They read this technical text to learn about Legos, fun facts, and to follow directions.  They LOVE Lego magazine!  

We also learned a new math game called Base-10 Exchange.  You can play at home but instead of base 10 blocks, use dimes and pennies.  Your first grader can teach you!