Teach students to note important information
Start saving those Snapple drink caps! Underneath each lid is a Snapple Fact. Julie Meitzler has found them to be a fabulous tool when teaching her Bluffton-Harrison fourth graders how to sift through nonfiction research, sorting out the generic information from the most important.
After reading several Snapple Facts to students, she defines what makes these facts valuable. Then Julie and her students come to the conclusion that all the Snapple Facts are interesting and unique, offering odd, unusual, extra-ordinary bits of information. This is her hook before having students start their own content-area research project. To help them remember to look for facts that would engage and interest the reader, she created a Snapple Facts note taking page .