7 Responses

1. Very interesting! Thanks for sharing!

2. Hear, hear!! Give the children what they want!! 🙂

3. This is very interesting, Melissa. I don't know what you'd call my writing style because it has always been blended. When I studied science in college and graduate school I had a LOT of labs. There was absolutely no integration of the lab work and the lecture. As early as the first publication of Science Experiments You Can Eat (1972), I integrated expository material for the scientific principles behind the question that was explored with hands-on activities. This validated the concepts as the reader became his/her own primary source by doing the activities –hence no need for back matter. SEYCE has endured because it is a lab manual that includes settled science in physics, chemistry and biology. Since then I have revised the book twice (the latest in 2016) but only to add new material expanding the topics and updating procedures for reagents, etc. that have disappeared from stores but can now be found on line. On occasion, even in the first version, I included narrative anecdotes to bring the expository material to life. I Face the Wind (2004), for pre-literate children, which presents observation with activities in a narrative form and takes the reader away from the book, temporarily looks like a picture book but includes a note to the reader on how to share the book with the child was the first picture book and first science book to receive a Sibert Honor in 2004. My latest book, How Could We Harness a Hurricane? (2017) a STEM notable, has it all–activities, expository material, narratives which I employed as dictated by the material that I had to discuss.

   One of the interesting things about the new nonfiction literature is that authors are using creative ways to introduce material. Read my review of Heather L. Mongomery's upcoming Something Rotten: A Fresh Look at Road Kill. (https://www.vickicobbsblog.com/blog/lessons-from-the-dead ) If I had to fit it into a genre, I'd call it a memoir.

   Just as the novel has used stories to illuminate various aspects of the human condition, nonfiction authors are using a variety of formats to communicate knowledge of the real world through their own personal and very human filters.

4. Most of your books are expository. Many books are blended–it's a continuum. But there are books that are mostly narrative and others that are mostly expository, and those are the ones used to test children and that I used in my survey.

5. Your welcome, Jennifer.

6. For some reason, author Roxie Monro has been unable to leave a comment here, so she asked that I add it below:

   "So agree with this! Children, librarians often tell me, come in and ask for books about how things are made, about how stuff works, about science and nature – not every child wants stories. Expository literature, as Stewart has discussed before, can be exciting, creative, and fresh. Even fun!"

7. Thanks, Roxie. The more I talk about this topic, the more I hear from librarians and teachers about students who prefer expository nonfiction. It's so important for book collections to include the kind of nonfiction that info-loving kids are most likely to fall in love with. That's how we create life-long readers who love learning.