Recently, school librarian D’Anne Dwight Mosby tagged me on Twitter so I could see the great activity her students were doing to think more deeply about the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction. I knew other educators would want to give D’Anne’s idea a try, so I asked her to write a blog post.
When I received D’Anne‘s piece, I was delighted because not only is it a powerful activity, it’s practical and timely. Thanks so much, D’Anne!
My first introduction to the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction classification
system came from an article in School Library Journal in 2018. At the
time, I was working hard to build a better, more readable nonfiction collection
in my library and used the system to find various kinds of reading choices
within that nonfiction collection.
Fast forward to 2021, and I am in a brand-new elementary
school with an incredible hand-picked collection of books and a team of highly
collaborative teachers. Four grade levels on my campus are focusing on inquiry
during our second nine-week term. When the third grade decided to read nonfiction
for fun before choosing research topics, I was excited to help them walk through their
inquiry project slowly.
To
me, sharing a love of nonfiction falls under a role that I love as a librarian:
Promoter of Knowledge and Critical Thinking. Of course, I want students to love
to read any genre. But I also want them to get the most out of their reading,
and nonfiction is written to teach us about the world and help us become
critical thinkers about the world.
My
goal then, was not only to promote reading, but to also promote thinking. So, I
turned to what I have learned in reading the recently published book
5 Kinds of Nonfiction: Enriching Reading and Writing
Instruction with Children’s Books by Melissa Stewart and
Marlene Correia, to give my students a reason to read informational text and
nonfiction books that went beyond enjoyment. I wanted them to read to learn, to
discover, and to grow.
My teachers stated that most of their students found
nonfiction “boring,” so they had anxiety about where this research project
would lead. They believed that students consider expository nonfiction as
static and dull. That is the category they most often encounter in guided
reading and in testing.
But I know by how my National Geographic: Weird But True copies
fly off the shelves that students do love expository nonfiction, they just don’t know they
are reading it! And I had previously worked with third grade to introduce
Literary Nonfiction by reading aloud Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis
Mellifera by Candace Fleming.
cycle of a bee and had even gotten choked up by poor Apis’ death.
So, I knew they only needed to be reminded of the nonfiction they have enjoyed
in the past to find nonfiction they can enjoy now.
As I prepared my lesson, my goal was to show students that
nonfiction books hold more than facts and figures. And as the students were
entering a research unit, I wanted them to read to enjoy but also read to retain.
Therefore, my idea of making our nonfiction exploration “detective work” was
born.
To introduce them to the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction, I used the recommended lesson
from Melissa’s website: I showed them 5 books on one
topic, each from a different category. For narrative nonfiction, I chose Honeybee
by Candace Fleming. They remembered how we noticed the literary elements and
the nonfiction content. I pulled other books about bees that showed traditional,
expository literature, browseable, and even an active nonfiction book on how to care for
bees in order to demonstrate that authors reveal information in varied ways.
I
explained to students that when we read nonfiction, we are not just reading to
learn, but reading to discover. I asked them to tell me what a detective does.
They
answered with thoughts like: gather evidence, find clues, solve crimes.
I
told them that reading nonfiction makes them an investigator, a detective. And
authors use things like text features to provide evidence on topics. Their
challenge was to investigate each kind of nonfiction and look for ways authors
provided evidence (text features).
Each
student was given a clipboard and a chart to fill in as they went through the
investigation stations. On the handout, I had created a chart of each of the
kinds of nonfiction and a checklist of the kinds of text
features they had studied. Each station had 5 to 6 examples of books from the 5 Kinds
of Nonfiction, but all on various topics.
Students had 5 minutes per station to simply preview the
evidence, looking for the way this category of nonfiction presented its
information. Students found that narrative nonfiction had evidence ensconced in the story, whereas
browsable nonfiction used many text features to share tidbits of “text
evidence.”
Students noted what they liked or did not like about finding
information in that category of book. A few students found browseable
nonfiction overstimulating and preferred learning from text presented as a
narrative. Some found traditional nonfiction comfortable and preferable. And
many loved knowing that active nonfiction comes in an extensive range of topics—not
just origami!
After investigating each nonfiction category, I gave students
time to choose 3 topics of interest and look at books from that area of the library
to see if they could find some in their preferred category.
Circulation of our nonfiction books has doubled since that
lesson! And when it came time to teach students how to find database articles
for research, students took their detective skills further and practiced
skimming for “evidence.” Many students pointed out that even online reading
fits into the five categories. The National Geographic Kids database is very browseable.
Britannica Online is quite traditional. And Gale in Context leads them to
articles that share information in a more literary way, such as narrative and
expository literature.
I
believe that identifying the kinds of nonfiction has helped my students to
recognize
their preferences and their own talents in reading. My students who love
browseable nonfiction would have been the ones to say they don’t like reading.
But now they know that reading is done in various ways and learning is an
investigation.
D’Anne Dwight Mosby is a Texas Certified School Librarian, Teacher, Google for
Education Certified Trainer, Pear Deck Coach, reader, leader, and lover of all
things #edTech! D’Anne has taught ELAR at the junior high and high school
levels and has eleven years of experience as a school librarian for
kindergarten through eighth graders.
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2 Responses
Hi,
I am a Librarian in Texas and I would love to do the Sibert Smackdown with 5th grade this year 21-22. I was wondering if you have an updated list of nonfiction books you would recommend for us to look at? I am only able to find the list you posted last November.
Thank you so much!
Here's a link:
http://celebratescience.blogspot.com/2021/11/its-time-for-sibert-smackdown.html