First+Grade+Students+use+Nonfiction+Writing+in+Family+Message+Journals

A study that was done to demonstrate the teaching of science writing to first graders was done by Wollman-Bonilla (2000). In this study, students in a first grade class were asked to keep a Family Message Journal, in which they wrote letters to their family members about class science experiments. Students also wrote fiction, letters, and poems, but for the purpose of this study the researcher focused primarily on the scientific journal entries to identify the conventional features of science writing (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000). Four students were selected for this particular study and their science writing was categorized into reports, experiments, and explanations. Wollman-Bonilla (2000) found that “60% of the first graders’ science messages” fell under the category of report (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000, p. 48). Overall, all of the messages by the students fell into one of the four categories. A suggestion from Wollman-Bonilla (2000) is that students did learn many of the conventional features found in science writing and that “perhaps repeated modeling, with student participation in constructing models, may be a powerful instructional tool; explicit instruction may not be as essential as other researchers suggest” (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000, p. 58). This research shows how modeling with student participation may be a beneficial way to teach nonfiction genre writing.