November is one of those months that’s filled to the brim with reading and writing celebrations — from NaNoWriMo to National American Indian Heritage Month to Picture Book Month, and all of the other celebrations cleverly packed into this children’s activity calendar by Matthew Winner. It’s not like you have to look hard to find a reason to celebrate books and reading. Books are great, yeah!
We highlight all kinds of literature throughout the year with our displays, our recommendations, and our bulletin boards. While I usually weave nonfiction books into my displays, they’re not generally the ones that get a ton of love, especially when sitting side by side with a bright and shiny story. So, I’m skipping the calendar and focusing my November on celebrating nonfiction books in the library. Because there are TONS of kids who LOVE to read nonfiction, but they don’t get to share that love as easily as our fiction readers do. I’m still in the planning stages of what this will look like, but here are some ideas so far…
November Nonfiction Reading Challenge
Created for my first through fourth grade students (and teachers), here’s a nonfiction reading bingo-style card. I’ll share it with classes early next week and hope that I get some participation! Feel free to copy and adapt for your school.
I also created a Nonfiction Read-Alouds list on Destiny (click Lower School > Resource Lists > Nonfiction Read-alouds), most of which will be on my window display. These books have been published in the last few years and lend well to classroom read-alouds. I’ll share these books with staff in a newsletter later this week and hopefully get them on board with Nonfiction November, too.
Other ideas floating around in my brain include a Question of the Week for students to research, an interactive poster on what students are curious about and want to learn more about, and nonfiction booktalks to our older classes. Not sure if time is on my side, but I’m going to give it a try! How do you celebrate nonfiction reading in your school? Is Nonfiction November in your future?
Happy reading (and fact-checking!),
Natalie
I do a trivia challenge each week for my middle schoolers and it’s been great at getting them to explore our nonfiction section. I require them to give me a “citation” for their answer. Here’s a blog post I wrote about if for Programming Librarian : http://www.programminglibrarian.org/blog/making-trivia-masters-using-trivia-turn-students-explorers
I could not find the non-fiction read aloud list. I went to the lower school and clicked on resource lists. There were only 5 there and none were a read aloud list. I even checked the upper school which had a ton of resource lists, but none of them seemed to fit the bill. Is it possible that you made it private, and not public?
same for me!