All About Penguins Book

Our most recent National Geographic Kids focused on penguins lend itself nicely to a little penguin unit study.  We researched penguins using a Brainpop clip, reading our awesome Nat Geo which provided a lot of great info for my 2nd graders, and using a few nonfiction easy readers.  After reading/watching, we'd add facts to our penguin circle maps. Then, after our circle maps were full of wonderful penguin facts we then moved them into a tree map to organize our facts.  For our penguin tree map, we had four branches - looks like, lives, eat, and predators.  The kids organized their facts under the specific branches to make writing their penguin book easier.  I decided to focus the kiddos instead of just letting them write. I'm finding on report writing at 2nd grade level in a highly ELL population, we're really struggling at knowing what to write, how to sequence, and how to focus on important information, so I'm using this writing assignment as a way to scaffold their learning.

Here's our tree map and planning...

 

Below are some pictures of their finished books.....

 

**Sorry for the sideways pictures, BlogSpot and my computer weren't working with me :-).