Melissa Stewart

My name is Melissa Stewart. I’m a children’s book author. I have written more than 200 science books for kids, all the way from board books up to YA. And I’ve written some books for teachers too. 

I went into writing children’s books because you really can make an enormous difference in the life of a child if you are able to get to them at a young age. When adults read a book, they might think it’s interesting, but when a child reads that book, not only is it interesting, it can easily change the way that they see themselves and the way that they see the world. And that’s really exciting. 

So when I was a young child, I was a science kid. I really loved science and nature, and I really traced that back to my parents and the way that I was raised. We grew up on a 10-acre plot and my father was always taking us for walks in the woods. And one day he took me to a place where we had never been before and he said, do you notice anything unusual about this area of the forest? And I wasn’t sure. My brother wasn’t sure, but then I said, all the trees are kind of small. And he said, that’s exactly right. It’s because there was a forest fire here about 25 years ago, and now the forest is beginning to regenerate itself. And that was really a critical, magical moment in my life, kind of an aha moment because I realized number one, that nature is so powerful that it can regenerate itself, but also that you can read the history of a natural area just by looking around. 

And that’s what turned me on to all the topics that I write about now. But it wasn’t later actually until I was in college that I started to think about writing as a job. I was a biology major and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do afterwards, but I had a teacher, a professor who came to me with an article in Discover Magazine, and it was about a topic that I was doing a research project on, and she said, you could have written this article, I think you’re a really good writer and maybe that’s the job for you. And again, it was sort of an aha moment because she saw a talent in me that I didn’t even know I had, and she pointed it out. And that really led me on the path. I ended up going and getting a master’s degree in science journalism afterward, and I started editing science textbooks and then I turned into an editor of the kinds of textbooks or kind of books that I now write, and then eventually I started writing them as well. So it was a bit of an unusual path, but I’m lucky that I started writing for children when I was pretty young. A lot of children’s writers don’t really begin until they have children of their own. So I’ve been able to make this a lifelong career. 

So I’ve been keeping nature journals since I was 20 years old when I saw a friend’s journal, and he sort of helped me to get the ropes of it to see how it could be structured. And over time I used to keep writing journals and nature journals separately, but at a certain point I decided to merge it all together because really it’s just who I am. It’s how I live my life. And I get so much inspiration from them that it really is very helpful to have them merged. And they look different ways at different times. Sometimes they’re mostly text, sometimes they’re mostly drawing, A lot of times they’re combinations of the two. And I’m not a good artist. You’ll probably notice I have not illustrated my own books, but that’s not really what a nature journal is about. It’s about capturing what you see, what you observe. 

And I often will go back to my nature journals, especially I keep travel nature journals when I go on trips to, I’ve been to places like Africa and the Galapagos Islands, and I am often going back to those nature journals for inspiration, but also for the observations that I’ve made of certain animal behaviors. Because in the nature journal, it’s different from just reading a description that’s in a scientific paper. I can actually, when I read those descriptions, number one, they’re raw and they often have rich language, but also they transport me back to that place and that time, and that helps me to make my writing even more engaging. 

I am lucky to have been able to travel all over the world, and many of those trips were taken in my 20s and 30s. So I’ve been able to draw on them for my whole career. And it allows me to see the animals firsthand and to really understand how they thrive in their environment, how they move, what they eat. When you see that firsthand, it really stays with you. And that can inspire me to write about certain topics. It certainly will infuse what I’m writing with a kind of vibrancy that I think is exciting. And another thing about those trips is the trip that I took to Africa and the Galapagos Islands, they were run by the American Museum of Natural History and they were intended for scientists, and they let me be part of it because I do have a science degree, but I don’t have a PhD. 

But they thought I brought kind of a nice diversity to the group in terms of the backgrounds of the different people. But what that means is that I have made these strong connections with scientists that I can then draw on as I’m doing research, I can call them up and say, hey, I was just wondering about this area of research, and could you tell me a little bit more about it? Or I could say, I’m writing a book on whale falls. Do you know someone who would be the perfect expert for me to talk to? And so often those relationships that I’ve built over time that are founded in those research trips have blossomed and grown into other relationships too. 

There are four main ways that I do research, and a lot of these are the same ways that students do research too. I will read other books on the topic. I will also read scientific articles and magazine articles. I will use the internet, although very carefully, because you don’t really know what you’re going to get. You can’t always trust it. You always have to verify it. I go out and make observations, and so that can be near my home or it can be when I travel to various parts of the world. 

And then the last way that I get information is by talking to experts. And this is critical, especially when you’re writing science, because science is changing all the time. There are new discoveries every day. And to get the most specific new, exciting discoveries, scientists are on the ground doing the work. And they can really help you not only to talk to you about the topics that you’re writing about and their expertise in that area, but also to help you understand what has happened in that maybe three-ish year period of time between when scientists are publishing their papers, their academic papers, and what they’re actually doing right now. And so that allows me to have kind of up to the minute information in my books. 

Because my books are expository nonfiction rather than narrative nonfiction. Text structure is a critical factor. There is no built-in story. If you were writing a biography about a person’s life or if you’re writing about a historical event or a historical period, there’s a built-in story and narrative nonfiction works really well, but when you’re just sharing facts, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. And a narrative writing style really doesn’t work. So expository nonfiction is really the way to go. 

And with narrative nonfiction, you have a sequence text structure, you’re following the events or the person’s life. But with expository nonfiction, you can have any tech structure that you can think of. And so there are five main text structures that students are learning in schools. But the truth is that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more they can be book specific and there are also some that are common, but don’t happen to be in those five text structures that kids are learning. 

So for my book, Thank You, Moon, this has a compare and contrast text structure. And then within the compare and contrast text structure, it’s important to understand how the information is going to be arranged, how it’s going to be organized. So this is what’s called a list book, which is basically talking about an animal behavior or a phenomenon, and then how it affects various different animals. And then so we’re comparing the way that the different animals respond to moonlight. For some it helps them to find food, some it helps them avoid enemies, some it helps them migrate, some it helps them with their reproductive cycle. And within that, I’m pairing different animals by the kinds of things that they do under the moon. I’ll just read you a little tiny snippet.

Thank you, moon, for being Earth’s constant companion in space and making life on our planet possible. And you can see this stunning art here by Jessica Lannan, who is just so talented. Thank you for guiding tiny turtles to the sea, and dung beetles to their burrows. Thank you, moon, for giving lions a chance to feed their families, and gazelles a chance to eat in peace. And then there’s one plant in the book. This is a joint pine. It’s when it releases its pollen so that the moss can come and pollinate it. 

And so you can see how those pairs actually help with the flow of the text within this compare and contrast text structure. 

I think that it’s important to think carefully about vocabulary when you’re writing a children’s book. I think a sprinkling a scattering of large words, especially when they’re specific words, precise words, the exact word that needs to be used to describe a certain phenomenon or a certain animal behavior is okay. You don’t want so many large words that children really have trouble following the text or they feel overwhelmed. 

But I think in, so for example, in the book Whale Fall, I use the book, I use two really large words. I use delta proteobacteria which are specific kind of bacteria that you find at the end of the whale fall. And then the other word that I used was Oceanospirillales, which are another kind of microbe that is involved in breaking the whale down. So this book is about animals that, or all kinds of different living things that feed on a whale when it falls to the ocean floor, A gray whale, this is about a gray whale in particular might live 50 years, but when it falls to the ocean floor, it can feed and house a community of creatures for another 70 years, which is pretty incredible. This book talks about that process and all the different animals that are involved. There can be thousands of species, millions of individuals. I’ll just read you a tiny bit of this book. 

When a whale dies, its massive body silently sinks down, down through the inky darkness, finally coming to rest on the soft silty sea floor for the whale, it’s the end of a 70 year life, but for a little known community of deep sea denizens, it’s a new beginning. The whale fall is a bountiful gift that can sustain life for another 50 years. 

I think that studies show that there’s very little nonfiction read aloud happening at school and probably not at home either, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t. I think the strategies might be a little bit different in some cases. I think if you’re working with a large group of kids, there’s often a lot of things happening on the page of a nonfiction book. And so something like a document camera might be helpful. 

It might also help to have some props that are helping to build background information before you read and introducing some of those vocabulary words that we were talking about before, if necessary. 

Also, I think one really important thing to realize is that you don’t need to read the entire book. So for example, if you’re reading a browsable book, there’s no reason that you can’t just read one page or two pages. 

You can also sort of sneak in nonfiction, read alouds. Let’s say you have a few extra minutes as the class is lining up for recess or lunch. You can read one spread there, and it’s an opportunity to show that you honor nonfiction, that you want to bring it in to your classroom, but you’re not taking away from any instruction time. And also you can read books that are related to whatever you might be discussing in science or in social studies. And there are so many different great topics that you can find in nonfiction. So I really hope that people will start doing that more. 

I co-wrote the book Five kinds of Nonfiction with literacy educator Marlene Korea. And it introduces a system for classifying nonfiction by its characteristics. And there are five, and I will start out by talking a little bit about traditional nonfiction. These are the kinds of nonfiction books that we all grew up with, but they have been evolving all the time. And this is one of my new brand-new favorites. This book just came out recently. 

Traditional nonfiction books are a broad introduction, a general introduction to a topic. They can be part of a series. They have an expository writing style. They often have various text features. They are looking at a broad topic and using clear accessible expository language. And so that kind of nonfiction has been around since probably the 1950s in the children’s market. What has come, there have been some newer kinds of nonfiction that have been introduced over the last 20 to 30 years. 

And the first of these is narrative nonfiction. So narrative nonfiction started out in the adult world in the 1960s or maybe early 1970s. And it started to appear in the children’s world in the 1990s. And see, these are books that tell a story or convey an experience. They are often biographies or books about historical events, and they have all the characteristics of the story except everything is true. So there’s a real character, there’s real settings, there’s real dialogue. And so these books are great for kids that really connect strongly to stories. Studies show that some children do and some children don’t. Traditional, I didn’t mention this before, but traditional nonfiction is great in the early part of the research process where you’re just sort of reading around a topic and trying to decide what you want to focus in on. 

And then a little bit later in the process, the research process, it’s great to use some browsable nonfiction. So these came into play in the early 1990s. They were invented really by Dorling Kindersley when they created their Eyewitness Books. And books have a lot of text features. They have a lot going on on each spread. They have a lot of little images, they have a lot of different text blocks. And these are great books for kids to share as a group. They also have tantalizing tidbits. And because they have all those text features, you can find specific information easily, which makes them great for more targeted research. 

Another category, a newer category that started to appear in the 2000s is called expository literature. And these books were really a reaction to what was happening in society and in publishing at that time. It was when No Child Left Behind was introduced, and a lot of money was taken away from school libraries to use to fund that programming. 

So we lost school libraries lost their budgets. A lot of school librarians lost their jobs. And at the same time, the rise of the internet made it pretty easy to get an article on. Let’s say you were writing about volcanoes or the Boston Tea Party, if you wanted just kind of that general introduction, you could probably find it on the internet. So nonfiction authors and publishers really needed to raise their game. And so expository literature still has an expository writing style, but it is more creative, it’s more focused. And because of that, it has richer language, it has strong verbs, it has all those characteristics that we think of when we think of writing craft. And so a few examples of that is this is a brand new book that I love, and a lot of expository literature books have illustrations, but this one actually has photos. So there are small groupings of text or less text on a page. There’s a really strong interplay between the art and the words. Here’s another example that also has two layers of text. 

And this one, the main text has a rhyming structure to it. And then there’s some secondary text. So these are really more literary than the other kinds of expository nonfiction. 

And then finally, we have active nonfiction, which is, can be part of it can teach a skill or it can be part of an activity. So for example, there are birds, this supports birdwatching. This is a great hands-on book about experimenting with matter. This is really well done. And so these can be also, they can be books that come packaged with a little model that kids build, or they can be cookbooks or they can be a book on creating origami. So there are all these different kinds of nonfiction that can be used in different ways at different times. And different kids enjoy reading different kinds of books personally themselves. And so when kids know the kind of nonfiction that they gravitate to the most, they can use that to fuel their independent reading. 

It’s important for so many reasons. I think in the, sure, exposing kids to more nonfiction is critical because I think in the adult publishing world, we fully embrace the idea that nonfiction and fiction exist equally. But I think a lot of adults in the past and a little bit still currently feel like kids prefer and gravitate toward fiction. But the research shows that that is absolutely not true — most children enjoy both fiction and nonfiction equally. And many gravitate specifically toward nonfiction. And they are the gateway to literacy for those students. When they’re exposed, when they have access to a rich diversity of nonfiction, they’re more likely to be engaged in reading and to become strong readers themselves. It also helps nonfiction loving kids. Some people call them “info kids” to realize that nonfiction reading is real reading. A lot of times these “info kids” will say, oh, I’m not a reader. 

But the truth is they’re reading all this nonfiction, but they don’t see those books. The message that they’re getting from their community is that these books are not as vital or valid as fiction. And so if we want these children to see themselves as readers and to continue reading these books that we love, we need to send the message that these books are, that they’re great, they’re interesting, they’re fun to read, and they should be a really strong part of any book collection, any classroom library. Any school library. And also part of instruction and part of home libraries as well. 

There are so many great ways to share nonfiction with kids, and I have a lot of ideas on my website. I would encourage people to go and visit it. It’s Melissa Stewart.com or you can also just Google Melissa Stewart author and it will pop right up. There are all kinds of ideas there, but you can also just try things like many schools do a mock Caldecott, but they could do a mock Sibert — the nonfiction award from the American Library Association. They could, many schools do March Madness fiction. You could do March Madness nonfiction. 

Pretty much anything that you’re doing with fiction, you can do with nonfiction too. You can also have specialized book displays. You can do book tastings, you can do book passes where you are introducing a variety of books, helping kids to understand what you have in your school library or in your classroom library. 

And you could do this with fiction and nonfiction. I think really the key is to treat fiction and nonfiction equally. And I think that’s starting to happen, but I think that there’s still work to be done. 

I think if teachers or parents are interested in learning more about this, the National Council for Teachers of English has written a position statement that was published in January, 2023. And it is a great place to go for all kinds of suggestions and ways of implementing it in your curriculum, but also it has all the research to support the idea that kids need to be exposed to more nonfiction. 

I think if kids want to connect to ideas, a great thing to do is to pair a fiction and nonfiction book. That way kids can have exposure to both kinds of writing. But I think also just looking for the topics that kids are fascinated by. I think one of the best ways to turn a child into a reader is to feed them a steady supply of books on topics that they find fascinating. 

And if you’re in a school setting and you can do what’s called a reading ladder where you’re slowly increasing the complexity of the books that you’re handing to that child, that’s a great thing to do. I think also trying to give them stacks of books and just see how they react to them. Which topics do they seem interested? Which writing styles do they seem interested? Which of the five kinds of nonfiction do they seem most interested in? 

And that can help you get to know them as a reader, but also get them to know themselves better as a reader. And just immersing them in nonfiction, giving them an opportunity to sort the books into different categories for themselves and to see what the wide world of nonfiction has to offer. They may not realize themselves, teachers may not realize themselves. A great thing to do in a professional development setting is to go to the school library and see what’s on a particular shelf in the nonfiction collection and what are the different kinds of books there. And to discuss ways that different kinds of books can be used in the classroom setting and in the library setting. 

So I have edited an anthology called Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep, and the subtitle of this book is “50 Award-Winning Children’s Book Authors Share the Secret of Engaging Writing.” And so this is 50 top authors in the nonfiction world, children’s nonfiction world, who are writing about their writing process and the things that are critical to the way that they write, how their passions, their fears, fuel their writing, how they choose their topics, how they focus their topics, how they make their writing their own, how they bring a piece of themselves to their writing. 

So there could be five biographies of a certain person, but each one is different because the person creating it is different and they’re each bringing their own sensibility and their own life experience, their own lived experience to that book. And I think when children have an opportunity to do that too, I think so many times children will do their research and then they’ll just dive into writing. 

But there’s a critical step in between where they need to synthesize. They need to assimilate their research and make their own personal meaning. What I always tell students in writing workshops is to read through your research and put it through your body to think about it with your mind and think about it with your heart and what is it that resonates with you? What about this person is specifically exciting to you? What about this topic? Are you dying to share with other people? And then focus in on that and that will make writing more engaging. 

When I’m doing school visits or meeting children, they often will share topics that they would like me to write about. So often it’s their favorite animal or something related to their community that they are closely connected to. But I think probably the most interesting request that I ever got was a boy who wanted me to write a book about why poop is brown! So it just shows all the different questions. 

There’s so many questions out there that kids can ask that kids are curious about. And the more that we can fuel their interests, the more that we can engage them and keep them excited about science, the more it will help us all. And we’ll have a future where kids are going into STEM careers and making a difference in the world.