Epic! for Readers Workshop Information Book Clubs

I've enjoyed Lucy Calkins Writing Workshop model so much that this year I decided to switch my reading block to reading workshop.  My school has not purchased Lucy Calkins' curriculum, so I've been creating the teaching points and lesson sequence on my own.

Having access to Epic! and all the amazing fiction and non fiction books in their FREE school library has been incredibly helpful for this switch.

My students and I are just about to start an information book club unit that will last for the next 6 weeks.  I gave the students several general topics and asked them to vote on the one they wanted to learn about during this unit.  The winning topic was habitats/ecosystems.  To start, each student will choose a habitat they want to focus on, and students who have chosen the same habitat will form a book club.

I've been busy creating collections of books for each habitat so that when we have reading time the students will be focused on reading rather than searching for books on their own.  This will also ensure that when book clubs meet they will have a common set of resources that they'll be discussing.  For each habitat I found 6-9 books that span the range of 1st-4th grade reading level, thus meeting the needs of all the readers in the class.

Here's the collection I created for the wetlands habitat.

Initially students will spend a few days doing book walks and diving deeper into learning about their chosen habitat.  After that, each student in the group will choose a specific subtopic to research in depth, becoming the expert in their book club on that topic.  It will be their job to find facts and photos about their subtopic.

Following review lessons about copyright, plagiarism and citing sources, students will gather information, either by taking notes on paper or in an app on their iPad, or by annotating screenshots from the books.

Here's an annotation a student did when research US symbols.

Having Epic! as a resource will make it easy for my students to be successful readers and researchers as we start this new reading workshop unit.  I won't need to visit multiple libraries to gather enough paper books, students won't have to wait their turn to read a book that I only have 1 copy of, and I won't have to spend a lot of money on book purchases.