Teaching Students to Navigate Nonfiction

  As readers of fiction we easily fall into a good story and allow ourselves to be swept away into another world. As teachers we want our students to become lifelong readers. The heart of reading is found in fiction, but the brain power lives within nonfiction. 
Teaching the Difference Between Fiction and Nonfiction
  The first thing readers need to learn is to identify the differences between fiction and nonfiction. 
  It's not enough to know that fiction is not real and that nonfiction is real. Students get confused when they see narrative nonfiction or realistic fiction. Teachers must explicitly teach how to identify the differences by modeling. You can also give students stacks of books to sort. Ask your students to justify their reasoning for placing a book in one category or another. 
  Teach your students the purposes of nonfiction, parts of nonfiction books, text features, and text structures. Nonfiction encompasses books, magazines, newspapers, ebooks, websites, mail, advertisement, brochures, and countless other formats. 
  We live in the information age at a time when information changes before we can blink our eyes. It's imperative our students learn to navigate this brave new world, sort through myriad sources, and recognize a good source from a bad source. 
  Information is at our fingertips, but if our students do not know how to critically sort through and read text they will become lost in information overload.
The Four Purposes of Nonfiction
  There are four basic purposes for nonfiction. Virtually every type of nonfiction writing will fit into one of these categories: (1) to inform (2) to express (3) to persuade or convince and (4) to give instructions or directions. This blog article is an information piece. Some blogs are an expression of a person's feelings about a topic or a recount of a personal experience. Some bloggers write with the purpose of convincing the reader to think differently or to take action. And then there are blogs that are meant to instruct or teach. A website, blog, book, magazine article or other type of text can easily have multiple purposes. It's our job to teach our young readers the sometimes subtle differences between different types of text.
MINI LESSON - TEACHING AUTHOR'S PURPOSE FOR NONFICTION
Parts of a Nonfiction Book
  I believe it's important that we begin teaching students at an early age the parts of a nonfiction book and how to use those parts effectively. When my daughter was in first grade she learned how to use a table of contents to find the pages she wanted to read. Children can begin learning about nonfiction in the early years. The time spent teaching students how to use an index, glossary, and appendices will pay off when they are required to use textbooks in core subjects in upper grades. Teaching these skills will help students to search for information by scanning. Scanning will help them to access the information they need quickly. 
NONFICTION READING PROJECT
Text Features
  I think it's easy to assume a reader will pay attention to headings or bullets, but in reality, unless we call student's attention to nonfiction text features, they will probably ignore this essential information. Once when my son was in fifth grade he failed a test because he didn't read the directions and ignored an important chart. This experience opened my eyes to the fact that students must be taught explicitly the importance of text features. I went back to my classroom with the goal of teaching everything from pictures and captions to timelines and graphs. I wanted my students to understand that the sidebar was there for a reason. Not only do text features give more information, they often summarize or show a picture to help readers understand and comprehend the information.
NONFICTION TEXT FEATURES "ABOUT ME" BOOKLET
Text Structures
  Authors organize expository texts in different ways. Teaching students different types of text structures helps them to work their way through the text and increases comprehension. 
  There are many different types of text structures, but you can start by teaching some of the most common ones: sequence of events or chronological order; compare and contrast; cause and effect; problem and solutions; question and answer; and description.
  One other structure that is used a lot in magazines and Internet articles is "top lists". Top lists list out the top ten or twenty (or any other number) of people, places, things, resources, or ideas. 
  I've noticed that teaching students to analyze nonfiction to determine how it is organized, and then writing a piece following a specific structure, not only helps students to better organize their writing, but it also deepens their comprehension of the reading material. 
  We may want our students to read fiction for the love of a good story, but we must teach our students how to read nonfiction texts. Nonfiction is the gateway to knowledge. 
  Your comments are welcome. How do you teach nonfiction to your students? What do you think is important about teaching nonfiction? Why do you think teaching students to navigate nonfiction is important to their futures?