Literary Non-Fiction Insect Books

This week, we have been creating our insect books! We are not completely finished but I wanted to go ahead and share a few pictures with you so far!

We have been researching 4 different insects: honey bee, cricket, ladybug, and butterfly! In reading, we are reading Eric Carle's books on these insects and in science we have been researching on the Internet and in non-fiction books.

The students chose names for the characters and have also includes facts. 

We ended the week by creating our covers for our insect books. We modeled our books after the way Eric Carle creates his illustrations by making a tissue paper collage!

Going on an Insect Hunt

Today, we kicked off our unit on insects by going on an insect hunt! We grabbed our wonder journals and pencils to sketch the insects we observed.

Eric Carle as Mentor Author

We have enjoyed studying Eric Carle's craft and techniques over the past few weeks. We learned that he writes literary non-fiction books mostly about animals. 

In science we have been researching and learning about 4 types of insects: ladybug, butterfly, cricket, and honeybees. In reading we have been gaining more facts about these insects through Eric Carle books. In writing, we created our own insect literary non-fiction books with Eric Carle as our mentor. 

We learned that Eric Carle makes a tissue paper collage to crest his beautiful illustrations. Of course, we had to try it out!  We began by painting our paper:

Then, we pasted the painted paper into a collage to create the illustration:

The students worked so hard on these literary nonfiction insect books!

Insect Fact Posters

Our class has been very busy this week! We have been creating fact posters for each insect based on the facts we learned from research. We are using these posters to write literary non-fiction books about the insect of our choice.

Please check back in to see samples of our literary nonfiction insect books.

We went on a bug hunt!

To start our insect unit, we decided to go on a bug hunt to find different kinds! 

After observing and recording our findings, we came back to the classroom to determine if the bugs we found were insects or not. We learned from research the insects have 6 legs and 3 body parts. We determined that the spider was not an insect because it had 8 legs. The beetle we found was an insect! This was such a neat way to begin our exploration of insects.