WHY MORE NON-FICTION?

Dr. Wendy Ghiora – Posting #83 – February 19, 2011

“Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read non-fiction and they can’t read non-fiction because they don’t know enough about the real world, “claims Jay Mathews, a writer for the Washington Post.

I say, it’s all in the presentation. Start presenting non-fiction at an early age, use materials you know will catch their interest, and you just might hook a student and have him or her begging for more. Since 80-90% of what we read and write is non-fiction, I would affirm reading more non-fiction is an important piece of today’s education.

Reading interesting non-fiction articles during Read Aloud time, will give kids experience in listening for information, which is the purpose of this genre. Teachers consider it a challenge to find lessons including non-fiction. Adding non-fiction to reading lessons, marks a shift after years in which they put most or all of their energy into getting students excited about storytelling and reading fiction.

Children deserve more exposure to non-fiction, as most of their adult world will consist of this type of reading and writing. Kids deserve to be exposed to a variety of nonfiction books - texts in different formats, about different topics, and written by different authors. Read aloud is a perfect time for students to fall in love with nonfiction. Some of the non-fiction topics I have found that spark an interest with children include:

Animals, Heroes, Amazing & Weird True Stories (on practically any topic), Biographies/Autobiographies, Sports, Music Legends and Dinosaurs. One of the best sources I have found for interesting non-fiction articles is Kids National Geographic (online). Imagine asking your students, “Have you heard about the tattooed mummy found buried with the gigantic war clubs of a warrior? And to everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be the body of a woman in her early 20’s?”

When you think about it, from the minute you wake up in the morning, browse through the morning newspaper, follow the road signs to work, listen to the local news and weather report on your radio, grab the mail from your inbox, it is predominantly a non-fiction world. Let’s make it interesting, fun and compelling for our kids to learn and use all things non-fiction.

Oh, just in case you had a little spark of interest in finding out more about the tattooed mummy, here’s the link: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/history/tattooed-mummy/