Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s the perfect day to celebrate the people and things we love. It’s also the 1-year anniversary of the #KidsLoveNonfiction
campaign—an effort to raise awareness of all the wonderful nonfiction books available
today and to celebrate the children who love reading them.
The campaign launched with a
letter asking the New
York Times to add three children’s nonfiction bestseller lists—picture book,
middle grade, and young adult—to parallel their existing fiction-focused lists. The petition was also shared on more than 20 blogs that
serve the literacy and children’s literature communities, including Celebrate
Nonfiction.
According to the letter penned by literacy professors Mary Ann Cappiello and Xenia Hadjioannou:
“[A]l too
often children, parents, and teachers do not know about recently published
nonfiction books. . . If families, caregivers, and educators were aware of the
high-quality nonfiction that is published for children every year, the reading
lives of children and their educational experiences could be significantly
enriched.”
Even
though the New York Times denied the request, the letter is continuing to collect signatures, and you can sign it right now. The info-loving kids in your life will thank you.
In the following months, the #KidsLoveNonfiction campaign broadened its
focus, leading to:
–several more posts on Celebrate Nonfiction,
–posts here
and here on the PLOS Scicomm blog,
–an article in Publisher’s Weekly, and an upcoming editorial in NSTA’s Science & Children,
–the SLJ webinar “5
Ways to Increase Nonfiction Circulation & Create Passionate Nonfiction
Readers,”
–three research studies that are
in now underway.
–and the creme de la creme, Mary Ann and Xenia led a 10-person team (including me) in writing a Nonfiction Position Statement for NCTE. Here’s an article from EdWeek that highlights its major points.
Right now, classroom libraries have four times more fiction than nonfiction. Elementary school libraries and the children’s collection at public libraries have two sections for fiction, but only one for nonfiction. This position statement gives educators an opportunity to pause and reflect about the choices that led to this inequity.
This statement is a win for the children I meet at every school who proudly spout strings of facts about marsupials or dinosaurs or the planet Mars. It’s for the third graders who raise their hand in the middle of my presentation and shake it at me until I call on them because they can’t wait to tell me they see a “hidden” pattern in my book Can an Aardvark Bark? These students need access to the kinds of books that will fill them with joy and have the power to turn them into lifelong readers.
According to Publisher’s Weekly, nonfiction accounts for 63 percent of adult book sales, but only 24 percent of children’s book sales. Let’s change start to that in 2023!
Keep spreading the message–#KidsLoveNonfiction
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