Story Times with Circle Maps

The Common Core State Standards make a point to infuse non-fiction into the curriculum.  Circle maps have been one way that I have tried to build on student learning in the area of non-fiction in our school’s media center this year.  For story time, we talked about what we already knew about “chickens.”  This information was included in a circle map and written in blue (see photo).  Then we read a fiction story, Chicken Big by Keith Graves, and a non-fiction book about chickens.  After reading, we recorded the new information that we had gained from our books on the circle map using a different color marker (red).  As a follow-up activity with some of my first grade students, they wrote about chickens and published their work at Pen.io.