Three Foldables to be Used with Any Nonfiction Text! Including a Free Download!

Have you heard of a foldable? Are you familiar with interactive notebooks? They seem to be the new fad and not only are they fun and a wonderful hands-on learning experience for students, they are also a great resource for a student to refer back to throughout the whole year. I used some high interest nonfiction books about sea life that my students were begging to read. Although we do not teach this topic in our curriculum, I tried to sneak it into my small group instruction. While teaching different ELA strategies, I was able to break the students up into small groups and allow them to use the underwater collection as a resource. This week my groups read different chapters in Clever Crustaceans and then jigsawed as a class to share out their information on the whole book. Together students from each group made a presentation sheet for the foldables they created. They were very proud of their results and LOVED sharing their posters with the whole class.

I had the most success with the students creating and completing

·            An accordion nonfiction summary

·            A vocabulary flip flap

·            A Venn-trifold

Nonfiction summaries are very difficult to write, and my students often struggle. The accordion summary foldable is a great hands-on approach to breaking text paragraphs up into shapes. While giving students one or two pages, from a nonfiction book, they can easily create a short summary. We focus on the five W’s, (who, what, why, where, when, and how) when writing a nonfiction summary. The students are easily able to locate the main idea and important details from each paragraph and write them into the boxes of the foldable.

The vocabulary flip flap foldable is always a student favorite. Not only is it a fun paper to cut and fold, but it also organizes information very well. When using this foldable, I choose eight vocabulary words, with a similar theme. The students write the vocabulary words on one side and define them on the other side of the little blocks. In the center, they try to guess the theme or the commonality between all words. When defining the vocabulary, they can use the nonfiction text features such as the glossary, index, bold face print words, or even context clues.

Using a Venn-trifold is very easy. It is just like a Venn- diagram, except the two opposite sides open and the commonalities are written in the center. Students usually use bullet points when writing on their trifold to keep it neat. It is a great visual aid when one side is colored one color and the other side is colored a completely different color. When the trifold opens, the students usually mix both colors together to signal “alike”.  

The students in my class were excited for group this week and could not WAIT to find out more information about the underwater sea creatures. 

 

Check out the materials by clicking here or on the picture below! 

I hope you can incorporate these fun foldables into your small groups or whole class lessons.