Stargazers

Stargazers, by Gail Gibbons

This week I chose to mainly focus on informational books. I found this book in my attic when I was browsing around for informational books that interested me when I was a little girl, but I didn't remember reading it or not so I decided to read it for my blog this week. The author starts out by explaining what stars are and what makes them shine. Throughout the book, the facts become increasingly more in depth, and there are captions in the pictures which define vocabulary words as well. Readers will find out much more than they thought they knew about stars, constellations, seasons, telescopes, and stargazing in general at a very basic level.

This would be a great book to use during an astronomy unit, especially connected with a KWL chart. Students could have conversations as a whole group or in small science groups about what they know already about stars, and what they want to know. Using this book and other resources, they could put together some sort of basic presentation for the teacher to assess what they have learned about not only the topic of stars and astronomy, but how students process information from factual books differently than other books. Students could also use stars as one aspect of astronomy as a focus for a presentation to the class while other classmates research others, and at the end the KWL chart could be completed and students could write down 2 facts during each presentation. Finally reading this book well after I got it as a little girl, I think I will include it in my class library and it has given me a starting point of ideas of how I might organize the books in my class library.