Students in Kristen Gironda’s second-grade class at Miller Avenue Elementary School are studying nonfiction in reading and writing and learning about how different text features assist them in understanding how a story is organized.

“One of the text features that we learned about was using a timeline to depict a chronological history of something,” said Gironda. “The students shared the timelines they created of their own lives, starting with the year they were born and then adding an important event or milestone for each year of their life.”

The components of a timeline including a heading, sidebars, photos, captions and diagrams, were incorporated into their personal stories to assist their classmates through the predictable placement of information, to help them learn more about each other.

The students are applying their new skills to assist them in the nonfiction topics and historical events they are reading about including the March on Washington and the Montgomery Bus boycott and how they related to the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.