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Reading Nonfiction Picture Books
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Reading Nonfiction Using Text Features
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Reading Nonfiction with 0-10 year olds
Reading Nonfiction stories introduces new vocabulary words, truthful ideas, and new information about our world. Nonfiction can be defined as, informational text that expresses researched content from science, art, mathematics, history, engineering, and many other areas. As your child progresses into different stages of reading features will be important to know such as the text, the vocabulary, and topics. Many of these features will become more complex, and eventually, when they are in secondary or high school your reader will have more informational text to advance their studies.
In this article, you can find additional information about nonfiction reading here.
At any stage that your child is in, you can read nonfiction text from infant, toddler, child, teen, and up. The best way to select nonfiction stories is to think about what your reader likes to do, and what you as a parent/guardian like to do. For example, if your child loves trucks, food, and planes then you can read about those topics. Alternatively, if you work in the arts or software then it would be good to read books about your areas of interest as well.
Below you will find suggestions on How to Read Nonfiction Texts using examples from these nonfiction books.
My First 100 Technology Words
Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering
Little Legends
Ocean (Magnetology)
Nonfiction Feature: Photographs, Illustrations, Icons & Captions
Pre-K book Examples
Imagery can help your reader understand the language throughout the book. The image gives a reference to what the word means. To read nonfiction books such as, My First 100 Technology Words or Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering series, the books use illustrations to expand on complex topics.
My 100 Technology Words is a visual text using images and captions. This book can support learning vocabulary. In addition, you can describe the word or icon as an example, stating in a sentence, or looking for other examples that you might see.
Example Questions
- Hammer “A hammer is a tool used to… What can you use a hammer with?
- Cloud “You can see clouds outside, but a cloud lives in the computer which keeps information.”
- Lever “A lever can be found on your belt, the handle on a car door, even if place it right your arm.
Furthermore, using the word in different ways can build a deeper connection to the text and allow for you and your reader to have conversations. To make an iconic book even more real you can encourage them to draw/scribble, or even use their toys if it is similar to an image in the book.
A series of narrative nonfiction books are written in Baby Loves Series. These are a series of STEM and history books for children ages 0-3. The author takes complex topics and breaks them down with a character who demonstrates or plays with the topic. For example in the Gravity book the baby practices dropping things. In Aerospace Engineering, the baby sees a bird fly and then sees an airplane fly. The author explains how flying is a form of aerospace engineering. In this example of a narrated nonfiction book, the characters are experiencing the topic and having a lot of fun as well. To expand on the vocabulary and illustrations, you can ask questions about the book.
Example Questions
- What do you see?
- I saw you do this too, let’s try____.”
- What happened when__?” “I like ___”
These are examples and you can ask many more.
Nonfiction Feature: Headings, Index, Bibliography
Elementary-Aged Books
Little Legends Exceptional Men in Black History, by Vashti Harrison
Little Legends Bold Women in Black History, by Vashti Harrison
Little Legends shares different historical stories about prominent Black men and another book about prominent Black women. This book is for readers ages 6-10 due to the word complexity and information. Each character is shaped the same, but she uses the different text features, colors, and wardrobe illustrations to differentiate the characters. In this nonfiction book, you can learn important details about each character.
Additionally, as you read use the text features to guide your questions.
Example Questions
- Look at the Heading, “What is his name and where was he born?”
- “Let’s find___ in the index.”
- “Look at the backgrounds how is this page illustrated?”
Nonfiction Feature: Captions, Images, Types of Print
Ocean by Ines Adam
Books for children ages 4-8 years old
Twirl books have a different mechanism so the reader can manipulate objects. In Ocean, Magnetology you can place objects on different pages. The book has backgrounds so these magnet pieces support the text. Also, different types of print are used to show the difference of text to read, captions, and headings of each page. You can discuss how the object moves on the page and what it does in the real world.
Click here for a full list of nonfiction text features. If you are lucky enough to have a library or books at home, take many chances to read nonfiction and fiction text with your reader.