Looking at Non-Fiction Writing through a UDL Lens

    This week, the goal was to learn about incorporating elements of UDL into lessons. You may be wondering what UDL stands for.  The Universal Design for Learning framework, also referred to as UDL, is a framework that gives teachers ways to help make lessons accessible for all students using different means of delivery. The assumption is that since no person is alike,  just as there are a multitude of learners in a classroom, they each come with their own way of processing and communicating information. Cultural backgrounds, language levels, behavior, and physical or mental needs affect how students learn. Since the UDL is a framework rather than a checklist, it gives teachers strategies to plan to provide the most successful learning experiences for their diverse classes. 

According to the UDL, this photo shows one way a teacher could provide a scaffold for the students. As the students were introduced to the term non-fiction, they had a clearly written, side with a plain background,  picture examples, and a linked video that the children watched to help them understand the meaning of non-fiction. 

    I observed and participated in a lesson taught by my mentor teacher to introduce our current writing unit. The topic is nonfiction writing, but it also ties in with science, and the final project will be for the students to write and present an All About animal book that they have authored and illustrated themselves. Overall, the children are excited about getting to write their own books. We have a few students who have siblings that had made books in Mrs. V's class before.

    "Mrs. V, where are we going to get the information to use for the books?" one of the children asked. To answer, she had the class get up and walk back to a table in the back of the room to show them the books she had gathered for them to use. She went through showing all of the covers, reading the titles. Next, to practice how the children will use the books to research their animals, Mrs. V had each child grab a book and return to sit on the rug in the front of the room. The day's learning target was, "I can identify non-fiction text features and explain how they help me understand the text."

This photo shows another way the children were engaged in the topic and how Mrs.V provided a resource for their animal reports. The students were informed that they could pick out the animal they wanted to research. They were also told they could use other books from home or the library, watch videos, look on the internet, and discuss their animals with their family members. This lined up well with the UDL because the students get to choose their animals, and have many ways to choose about how they do research.

 

  

Seated, with their books open, Mrs. V. introduced each text feature and had the students look for it in their book. I walked around and helped to make sure the children were able to find what she had mentioned. I also tried to make sure our MLLs observed and participated. We looked at the table of contents, bold words,  headings, the glossary, and labels. We did not make any charts to record those words, but it is something that could have come in handy to meet the learning target. I am not sure if the students met the learning target. Informally, I saw students who were able to point out labels on multiple pages and find bold words they had seen in the glossary. Formatively, I think the children just need more exposure to those terms to retain them and are able to explain how they help them understand the text.

 

On Day 2 of the non-fiction writing lesson, we began the process of gathering information about an animal. Can you guess which one Mrs. V. chose?

As the children learn about narwhals, they will learn how to make the book for the animal they choose by making an All About Narwhals book. This is a proctice so they can become more independent in making the next book. It also prepares them for the end of the year writing assessment they will complete alone.

The UDL suggests providing ways for students to organize information. 

We began an anchor chart which was divided into quadrants to contain information for different information. The title was written across the top: All About Narwhals. Clockwise from the upper left, the quadrants were labelled as we came to them in the book Mrs. V read aloud to the students: appearance, habitat, diet, and predators. At the bottom of the chart, an extra category was added for an Interesting Fact. 

To scaffold so the kindergarteners could more redily access the text on the chart, pictures were added as reminders for what the headings of each section stand for. Eyeballs and the words look like were included in the appearance category, a picture of a plate between a fork and a spoon signified diet, and a house and the word "live" were included in the habitat space. 

Mrs. V reminded the children that they could raise their hand to share what they heard that dealt with the quadrant we were working on filling in as she read the book. Another UDL-type scaffold that she incorporated to help the children comprehend the text was to have them act out various vocabulary words. For example, we learned that Narwhals live in cold, icy water. So, the children decided that hugging themselves tightly and pretending to shiver represented the words cold and icy. Then, the kids moved their hands in a fluttering motion in front of them to represent the word water. Things like this made the lesson fun as well as more comprehensible for our MLLs.

Another activity the students took part in this week was to complete a directed drawing, which will become the cover of their All About Narwhals book. To change up the normal routine of sitting at tables to do the work, the children were treated to sitting at little Surf portable lap desks to do their drawings. They look a bit like this:

The lap desk has a flat part that the children sit on with their legs crossed which stabilizes the desk portion on top. When the children stand up, the desk portion tips forward, raising the seat off the ground at an angle.