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.
