Young Bird Books | Booklets | Fact Sheets | Into the Weeds | The Maker
About Young Bird Books
The most important goal of kindergarten is to make sure children are ready to make use of all the opportunities the next 12 years can provide them. The focus has to be on developing their social, emotional, and problem-solving skills, while introducing them to basic math and literacy tools. Sometimes this leaves little room to teach about the natural and cultural world of which they are a part. Fortunately, including a variety of informational texts in their literacy instruction can help.
The 2010 Common Core State Standards (CCSS) called for a 50/50 mix of literary and informational texts (aka non-fiction) across elementary curriculum materials. The reasons for an increased focus on informational texts included: helping with content area instruction; ensuring children were familiar with a variety of text structures; meeting the needs of children who do better with informational texts; and perhaps most important, feeding the natural curiosity of children for the world around them. Engaged children learn more.
The task for those teaching beginning readers is to find meaningful informational texts that are also accessible for their students.
While the number of informational texts for beginning readers has grown, the types of interconnections covered is limited. Most of the texts are descriptive or deal with simple sequences, like life cycles. They provide limited insight into the ways that real world things interact. Only a tiny percentage of texts deal with more complex ideas like cause and effect, compare and contrast, and problem and solution. Of course, it is very challenging to get beyond description when writing for readers with limited vocabulary and content background.
Challenge noted.
The goal of Young Bird Books is to create texts for beginning readers that cover the more complex interconnections. There are two kinds of texts on this site. The science sight word booklets explore a natural phenomenon through the lens of a cross cutting concept, like patterns, or cause and effect. The plant, animal, and fungi fact sheets provide a variety of facts about each species that could be used to learn about their relationships with other species and with the natural world.
No matter how good a text is, it does not stand alone. It is a teacher’s knowledge of what each of their readers needs and is ready for that makes the difference in the meaning a reader will be able to make of a text. In that spirit, I hope that these booklets and fact sheets help teachers make great readers.
About the Booklets
Sight words are the most commonly used words in the English language. Teaching children to recognize them on sight leaves more time for them to decode less frequent words, so they can read faster and with more fluency. Sight word booklets use sight words repeatedly in short sentences in just a few pages and include pictures to help readers figure out the other words.
I decided to try writing sight word booklets around a natural phenomenon in a way that helped illustrate a Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS) These standards incorporate three dimensions in science learning - science and engineering practices (like asking questions), cross cutting concepts (like structure and function), and science content (like weather). Here is a brief introduction to the NGSS.
Even if teachers just used the booklet for learning sight words, the student would still have had some exposure to a way of looking at the world that goes beyond description. And if a teacher used it to explore a phenomenon like shadows, or pollination, through the lens of a cross cutting concept, students would begin to understand the way that science seeks to make sense of the world.
The booklets come in two formats, a full page colored-in pdf that can be projected onto a screen, and a half page line drawing pdf, that can be printed out, cut, collated, and stapled to make a booklet for each student.
While my general science background is pretty strong, I am still learning about teaching reading. If you do use one or more of these booklets, I would appreciate your feedback. You can email me at weaver@youngbirdbooks.com. Here are some questions you might answer.
- Which booklet did you use and why?
- How did you use the booklet?
- Was it useful for teaching reading, or introducing a science lesson, or something else?
- What would you change?
- Would you use it again, or recommend it to others?
- Or if you have any questions....
About the Fact Sheets
The idea for the fact sheets came to me the day after I did Grandparents' Day at my granddaughter's Kindergarten. She had colored a grandparent coloring sheet for me. There were also pet, princess, and car coloring sheets. I thought - why not plant and animal coloring sheets? And why stop at the coloring part, why not make a fact sheet with an anatomically correct but colorable picture of a common species and information about its habitat, its ecology, and its lifecycle? It would be sharing multiple kinds and levels of information in one package, so if a child took it home, it might interest an older sibling or parent.
I have posted a couple of these and will share more in the near future. The text is at an upper elementary or higher level, but in many parts of the fact sheet, the pictures speak for themselves.
About Into the Weeds
This page is for anyone who wants to know a little more about a topic. For example, the sight word booklets reference the Next Generation Science Standards. This topic has a lot of content, too much for the pages on the booklets, so I have a page devoted to it along with some links for people who want to go even deeper.
Even elementary science concepts can benefit from being placed in context. For a living organism it may be details about its growth and development or the way it interacts with other species or its enviroment. For a physical phenomenon, it may be how it changes under different conditions or is affected by other phenomena. For the earth and the environment it may be their effect on living organisms and, in turn, the effect of living organisms on them. For a teaching concept it may the rationale for the approach.
The other benefit of digging a little deeper into a topic is that it soon becomes obvious that no one can know everything. That is ok. Hopefully it makes it a little easier to say "I don't know - but maybe we can find out more together". This fearless curiosity of not knowing but wanting to find out is the core of what makes all of us scientists.
Why call this section Into the Weeds? The expression "into the weeds" means to get deep into the details of a subject, possibly at the expense of losing focus on your main goal. But sometimes, you really do need to get into the weeds to be able to understand the most effective way to accomplish your goal. And sometimes, it may lead you places you never even imagined.
About the Maker
My name is Jan Weaver. I am a retired college teacher. I taught general science (physical, life, and earth sciences) and environmental studies at the University of Missouri. I also wrote two lab manuals, a monthly newsletter, and taught a writing intensive course.
While all my formal teaching experience has been at the college level, I have had lots of opportunities to share about science and nature with kids of all ages. When my kids were in grade school I developed and ran family science nights, and created programs for the school's annual health week for Kindergarten through 5th grade. The ways I learned to reach and teach elementary students informed and improved how I taught at the college level.
I am retired now, and I currently volunteering at a local elementary school, learning loads about how to help with reading, writing, math, and how to get along with others.
Jan Weaver (weaver@youngbirdbooks.com)
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Katherine Hanney, for introducing me to reading levels and sight words, and to Nanci Johnson, for introducing me to Katherine and letting me volunteer in her grade school classroom many, many years ago. I also want to thank all the folks who have provided free content on the web, from google scholar, to wikipedia, to teacher produced content that have helped me better understand how I might accomplish my vision of connecting learning to read with reading to learn.