Teaching Students to Compose Informational Poetic Riddles to Further Scientific Understanding

In most elementary schools, students spend more time reading and writing narrative texts and less time with informational texts. Yet, the Common Core State Standards advocate that informational texts comprise nearly half of K‐8 students’ entire academic reading, including content areas like science and social studies. The authors propose remixing informational writing with literature, new literacies, and scientific content as a way to mitigate the divide between narrative and expository texts. This article describes an instructional approach for integrating informational reading and writing with scientific content knowledge by: (1) reading and analyzing mentor texts, (2) furthering scientific understanding through Internet Workshops and (3) teaching students how to interpret and transform scientific content by composing informational poetic riddles, or as students prefer to call them, “What Am I?” riddles. This instructional approach can serve as a model and scaffold for teachers to use with other integrated units and Internet Workshops.