Dictionaries and Atlases

Dear Parents,

The past couple of weeks, I've been introducing students to new types of texts--atlases and dictionaries. In this world of Googlemaps and online dictionaries, it's important to remember that once these were things we looked up in books, mostly because some of the things that are intuitive about deciphering these kinds of resources to adults are the result of long hours of frustration using indexes and trying to find a word that's not spelled the way you think it should be.

So many types of texts have features that are unique. Students can better understand how to access these tools when they're taught them directly.

One of the science units in Grade One is Daily and Seasonal Changes. For this unit, it makes sense to me to dip toes in and out as we go through the daily and seasonal changes that make up the year: We track the weather and temperature daily in the classroom and our December field trip to High Park Nature Centre was a great way of getting students thinking about how changes in weather affect animals and how they adapt to their environments through the seasons.

For the rest, I've cribbed a bit from this page: www.mrcollinson.ca/DailyAndSeasonalChanges and seen where the conversation goes.

Students have been fascinated by talking about shadows and thinking about the rotation of the earth both on its axis and around the sun and a number of map related topics have come up, especially as students think about why Mexico and Cuba are so nice to visit from Canada at this time of year.


This book on Maps has been a long favourite in the classroom (Our copy is heavily taped).

I've also brought in some student atlases that include more features, like lines of latitude and longitude, for example. We spent some time looking at those today and I asked students what they noticed.

Today's letter of the day, with notes from student observations of Atlases

In this week's journals, students are drawing their own maps and incorporating some of the features we talked about during today's morning circle.

Thinking about dictionaries, one of our recurrent questions is "What do you do when you don't know what to do?" Some students always ask me to spell unfamiliar words for them--even though spelling isn't paramount to me, it is for some of them. Picture dictionaries seemed like a nice tool to help to address that. 

We talked about how a dictionary is organized alphabetically.



We discussed how not just the first letters go in alphabetical order, they all do--and there's a little box at the top to tell you what the first and last words on the page are.



These dictionaries also include a frequently used words index....


And thematic pages, in case you want to dive into a topic more deeply.




Interestingly, these dictionaries have been taken out quite a bit during quiet reading and Reading Buddies periods this week. We did some dictionary races on Friday that were a lot of fun as well as helping to build dexterity with different dictionary skills.






We'll be looking at non-fiction texts more closely in the next little while as we begin to research animals. Features like infographics, indexes, and tables of contents are not necessarily intuitive for beginning readers. We hope to unpack these some more in coming weeks.

Regards,

Ms. Goegan