Kids love nonfiction books: snakes, space, baseball, insects, dinosaurs. That’s perfect because the Common Core stresses reading nonfiction for developing informational skills.
What are some of the things we must remember to do to foster nonfiction reading?
1. Be a nonfiction reader who shares their love of learning new things by exploring information and sharing it aloud with kids.
2. Provide kids with nonfiction books that span below, at and above their reading levels to give them opportunities to gather information that is easy-to-read through challenging to read and understand.
3. Share tricks for informational reading: marking pertinent factoids, connecting those factoids to their lives and integrating the factoids with other information previously gathered from related topics.
4. Use higher level thinking skills: compare/contrast, adapt, analyze, synthesize, etc.
5. Encourage collaborative investigation that accepts the premise that even though kids may not find an answer or their search is inconclusive, the search, the striving for new information is worth the effort.