The best way to introduce students (and other educators) to the 5 Kinds
of Nonfiction classification system is to pull all the books off a shelf in the
nonfiction section of your school library and sort them. You can find
guidelines for this kind of activity here.
An important first step in this process is sharing a text set that
consists of five books that are on the same topic but represent different
categories. In 5 Kinds of Nonfiction, Marlene Correia and I suggest one
possible text set:
City Hawk:
The Story of Pale Male by City Megan McCarthy (narrative)
Feathers: Not Just for Flying by Melissa Stewart (expository
literature)
Penguins by Seymour Simon (traditional)
Eyewitness Books: Bird by David Burnie (browseable)
National Geographic Kids Bird Guide of North America by
Jonathan Alderfer (active)
During
presentations, attendees have let me know that it would be useful to have
additional text sets, so for the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing four more. You
can purchase the books I’m suggesting and use them, or better yet, you can look
at them as a group and use what you learn to create your own text sets.
I’m going
to start off today with a text set of dinosaur books:
Did You Know? Dinosaur by Nicholas St. Fleur (browseable)
Dinosaurs: Fact and
Fable by Seymour Simon (traditional)
Fossil by Fossil: Comparing Dinosaur Bones by Sara Levine (expository
literature)
How to Draw Incredible Dinosaurs by Kristen McCurry and Juan Calle Velez (active)
When Sue Found Sue: Sue Hendrickson Discovers Her T. rex by Toni Buzzeo (narrative)
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