Nonfiction. Books that are fact based, intended to present true events and information as accurately as possible. This book that I had grabbed down from the library this morning to use as an example for something else later would be an example of nonfiction. Most of what I’ve shared already is really great for fiction trade books, but nonfiction is something I find can be easy to overlook. They’re really great to add to our classroom libraries, but to actually find opportunities to include them in classes cannot come as intuitively as I find. But there are a number of ways that I have found, and I have gleaned from other teachers of ways to get nonfiction books into our students’ hands as well. Even though they don’t necessarily have the riveting stories that fiction stories might have.

Research Projects

Research projects are maybe one that comes to a lot of our minds. Projects that require students to spend some time, maybe in the library doing some research, looking through, discovering what’s out there. What are some options that I could consider for this research project?

One of my favorites that I’ve done has actually coincided fairly well with the Romaine Stauffer for the “Hidden Riches” and “Loyalty Test.” Right before that, I would lead my students in a research project. It’s one of the very first ones that they’ve done. I teach fifth grade, so they would have done some research before, but a lot more guided. I divide the class into small groups and each one is responsible for a colony. And so, there’s one group researching Georgia. One is working your way up the coast. And we go to the library. And I had planned ahead of time that we have some books in our school, little school library that we can use to pull out that they’re going to be able to use as resources for this.

One year I had a boy who got into this research thing where he’s looking at these books and discovering more about the colonies, like, ” Mr. Brode, what about the other colonies? Can I research those too?”

I said, “Oh, what colonies are you talking about?”

He’s like, “The colonies that eventually became Canada instead. We don’t really hear a lot about those.”

I was like, “You know, you’re right. There were more colonies that actually didn’t join the union. Well, let me look into that a little bit. ” And

“And so, we actually ended up ordering some more nonfiction books for our library about colonies that today are known as Ontario and Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island. And he spent the rest of the year poring over these things. And I had to think, well, how would he have discovered that interest if he hadn’t been introduced to this research project here? Maybe eventually. Apparently, that interest was buried deep down there inside somewhere. But that was what it took to get that out.

Research projects. The other thing I would just say about those is that it is a great skill to be able for students to read books and to synthesize it and put it together in their minds and to create writing about it. And so, I think we do need to teach our children, our students, how to do that. It’s an important skill.

However, what I want us to also consider are ways that we can have our students demonstrate what they’ve learned from nonfiction books in other ways too. There are so many other ways that we can take our learning from nonfiction books and still present it out to a class. Some examples that I’ve… I played with. Sometimes I find teaching to be a lot of play. But anyway, one thing that I played with was I have the students taking a nonfiction book and creating a story from it. And so, sort of making the jump from nonfiction to fiction.

Reader’s theater scripts are one fun way to do this. And so here is, for example, a book on explorers and traders. And this book starts and works from some of the very first explorers who set sail and works its way through the Panama Canal and then to the train age. But maybe pick one of those eras and create a short, several minute reader’s theater script that you can present to the class that lets us know, what did you learn from reading that book? That would be one. I’ve even given my students an opportunity. They can create a poster. I can give some structure, especially if you really want some specific things. It’s amazing how many different ways there are to take a research poster. I’ve learned that from experience. But if you give them just a few pointers, “I want you to include this, this, and this.” And then for the other things, “I’ll be in touch. I want to hear what you’re thinking. And it gives you an opportunity to engage in conversation. Is that important? Is that fact that you found in your book, is that worth putting on your poster? Or is there something else here that we might be missing?” There’s so many really great questions and skills that students can learn from doing a research project.

Graphic Organizers and Other Visuals

Graphic organizers and other visuals. One of the most basic, but yet one of the most helpful that I found are things like concept maps, especially for students who are just getting used to the idea of making something called a work web or a concept map. You can even give them… Let’s say that they’re reading this book on explorers and traders. And you might want them to really focus on transatlantic exploration. Explorers who were traveling from Europe and crossing into what became known as the Americas. And that gives them something specific to look for as they’re reading and they’re reading about and the explorers that came out of China hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

“Well, is that for this particular topic?”

“No, but it’s terribly interesting. I want to learn more about that sometime, but I don’t think that quite fits here.”

And they have to dive deep into the book and begin looking for examples. “Aha. The Vikings. Do they fit?” And they do, to my students astounded surprise every year whenever they find out that it’s actually believed that Leif Erikson and his crew were one of some of the first Europeans in the Americas, not Columbus.

Use as Mentor Texts

Mentor texts are another strategy of incorporating nonfiction trade books into my class that I was introduced to a number of years ago by another teacher. And this is more of a connection to how we can use books like this in our writing classes.

So, I don’t know what all you have encountered as your students write, but I generally personally tend to find that we use the same sentence structure over and over again. Subject verb. This person did this. This person did this. This person did that. Then this person did that. Then this person did that. The end and the sentence structure are not very eloquent. It’s not diverse. It doesn’t make for interesting reading.

What we idealize, I believe, as people is paragraphs that are written well. And I think sometimes we can get the perspective that we have to pull that out of ourselves somehow and find our own style, which I think we do. But one thing I think if we go too deep into that is we can miss how people have been influenced by other writers throughout time. It probably would be really hard to find a person who is a well-known writer today who was not well read before they started writing and who were influenced by other people that they read. And so, this plays off of that a little bit.

Can we find examples of well written work that our students can model after? And nonfiction is a really great way to do this. I just pulled a few little snippets out of this, some little sidebars that have just a little bit of variety in sentence structure.

This first one: “In 1414, Zheng He brought back ambassadors from East Africa and unusual presents.”

This is almost the subject verb, but it has one little difference. There’s a little prepositional phrase at the beginning to introduce it. That’s not something I find that students are just naturally led to include in their writing. But if you use a mentor text and we examine and break this apart as a class, like, “What did they do here? Could we do something like that?” And maybe we’re not going to write about a Chinese explorer. Maybe we’re going to write about something else. But the thing we’re going to do today, in just short little few sentences here, “Can we incorporate a prepositional phrase somehow at the beginning?”

“Yeah, I think we can do that.”

And so, then the students have a model to work after.

Here’s another one, “Here an attendant shows Ch’eng Tsu one of the gifts a giraffe.”

And the picture is in here. So, I’m not going to take the time to find it right now necessarily. But there’s a picture of these men looking at this giraffe in an environment that doesn’t look like it’s suitable for a giraffe. They had brought this thing on one of Zheng He’s ships back to China to just admire and marvel.

And down here is another example. “Some of the greatest inventions come from China. Early sea compasses…”

Ooh, and look at this sentence structure. We can include examples in there with the words “such as.” I find that’s generally not something that’s just intuitive to a fifth grader. But whenever they’ve seen it in a book and they’ve had someone draw attention to it: “Oh, I do kind of like the way that sounds. I think I could do that too.”

And so, then you can just do. This is not very long. This is, what, two sentences. So much can be learned in just a real quick two sentence writing activity using a nonfiction. You could even do this with fiction. As I’m going to say next.

(Oh, I pressed the wrong button. I better be careful here. The laser pointer on this actually closed the slides down.)

Incorporate the strategies for fiction. A lot of what we do with stories, chapter books, novels, picture books, they work just as well with nonfiction as well. If students are writing narratives, we can find what are some of our favorite books that we like to read? Some really great stories. And what tricks did the author do in their writing? Not really tricks, but what strategies did they use in their writing that makes it interesting?

“You want to keep reading? What are they doing? Can you name what those things are? Is it the way that they write their sentences? Is it some of the words that they choose? What is it about it? Can we kind of do something similar?”

Incorporate the Strategies for Fiction

Incorporate the strategies for fiction. Nonfiction can be used for read-alouds too. I won’t even give specific examples because I don’t want to limit it. If you go through your school library, your own personal library or bookstore and look at examples of nonfiction texts, quite a few of them would make really good, interesting read aloud as well.

Text features. Scavenger hunts can be another really fun way to get students interested and involved in diving deep into a book. And one thing that I like about this one is that it combats one specific habit that I’ve seen in students. And so, if I know I have to read this book, let’s say it’s this book here and I’m looking at all of this stuff. There’s this one beautiful picture here in the middle. And if I’m required to read this, what am I going to read? My first instinct.

Audience: “Captions.”

Are you? Alright? Yeah. Some students I have will read the captions, and they’ll read only those because it’s less. And they’ll say, “Okay. I read this page.” And they’ll skip over here.

I have some other students who actually will just read the main section and completely skip everything else. They might be less inclined to do that here. Maybe that works more in textbooks. “You know, I read the main section, but I skipped the charts and the tables and everything on side.”

Text Feature Scavenger Hunts

A Text Feature Scavenger Hunt requires students to pay attention to all of those other things in order to finish the activity. This is an example of a very elaborate one that I found that a teacher had made. I probably personally would not start off this big. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I would not. But what are some of the things in this book, these text features, that I want students to pay more attention to? Is it the captions? Is it the charts and the tables? Are there a lot of really helpful bits of information in the bar graphs in this book? What is it that’s really taking the material and putting it in a way that students are going to be more likely to remember it anyway.

And then lead them on a scavenger hunt. “I want you to find some examples of some graphs and what page did you find on, so your teacher can go back and look at it? But more importantly, what did you learn from it? How did it help you? Is there something that that bar graph on that page helped you understand? Or that map that showed you the routes that these explorers took? How did that help you?”

Again, this one has students looking for a little bit of everything. I can’t imagine any text feature that’s not included on here. Bold print, diagrams, index headings, bullets, illustrations, glossaries, captions, et cetera.

“What can you find in your book that you might have looked over otherwise? But by looking over, you would have missed something important?”