Last Inquiry Unit Lesson - One Tiny Turtle

This was my favorite book for our inquiry unit! I love One Tiny Turtle because it can be discussed on so many levels. This book lends itself perfectly to language workshop because it is a complex text. When teaching kindergarten, I would recommend using it at the end of the year; once students have experience participating in the kinds of critical conversations we expect. The best part about this book is that it has a narrative nonfiction style that tells the story of a loggerhead sea turtle's life cycle from hatchling to an adult finding her way back to the beach where she was born to lay her own eggs. The author also sprinkles in facts about sea turtles throughout the book, using a different style font. Students really enjoyed analyzing the narrative nonfiction style and comparing it to the informational text/facts the author presented. They picked up on the two different writing styles without my prompting! This book helps kids understand that not all nonfiction has to be lists of facts. Nonfiction can tell a story and be just as exciting as fiction!

Check it out!

One Tiny Turtle

Like I described above, we spent time during phase 2 (craft & structure) analyzing the author's writing style. I typed portions of the text and as a class we read these portions and determined if they were told in a narrative/story style, or if the author was simply presenting a fact (information). We created the following chart:

Here's one student's thoughtful log entry about these styles:

During phase 3 (purpose, meaning, connections to texts), I introduced another text, National Geographic Kids Sea Turtles:

This book is excellent because it had a lot of connections to One Tiny Turtle, but is written in a completely different style. Kids made a LOT of connections between the texts. While One Tiny Turtle introduces some information about sea turtles, National Geographic Kids Sea Turtles follows up with more details and new, exciting information. One big difference that we picked up on right away is that One Tiny Turtle talks only about the loggerhead sea turtle species. National Geographic Kids Sea Turtles introduces several species of sea turtles. We had to make a chart to record our connections as well as our new learning:

Check out some thoughtful log entries: