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Happy Saturday everyone!

Happy almost Father's Day!

This post is dedicated to my Dad...

The most AMAZING father and grandfather!

He was taken from us too soon and I miss him like crazy every day.  Love you dad! <3

This is also for my hubby...

another great father!!

So my big push this past year has been non-fiction.  We have done so many non-fiction related activities, stories, and writing to prepare for the big time... third grade!  I wanted to do something with some left over "National Geographic" magazines that I had... OK admit it.. you have a stack somewhere in your room too.  

I decided to combine my love of those magazines with the Literature Circle idea.  I created 4 recording sheets for each group... 

one on telling the important facts of the article
 one for the group to illustrate their favorite parts of the article (or for your advanced students, they can research further on the computer on things they want to learn more about) 
one page on writing interesting words and defining them
 and finally a page on connections and questions they had as they read the article

I put the kids in groups of 3 and 4 and they went to work... 

Some groups wanted to learn more so they read some info on the computer.  
Other groups looked up and printed more pictures.

They used the amazing pics in the magazine to illustrate their own!

Its hard to tell, but they spent the first day reading and highlighting the most important information in their article.  They then used that information to write a summary.  We talked about how to write the summary using their own words.

This is my favorite part! They took all those sheets and designed a poster.  They could use pictures, text, or captions from the magazine and put it on their poster.  The groups got really creative!

I love how it's a mix of many mediums.

They finally presented to the class.  In total we spent 4 days doing this project.  It was great for the end of the year and to incorporate non-fiction!

The sheets I used for this project were not full of cuteness.

So NOW... behold... the new and improved sheets all bundled up in a nice little pack...
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Yes, grab it up! (oh and leave some feedback when you do :)

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