Role nonfiction plays in the classroom and with our students

Nonfiction and narrative text

In chapter one, I was most intrigued with the discussion about the use of narrative and nonfiction texts in the classroom. In addition, the impact and changes predicted with the amount of information our students will be expected to process and organize in their lifetime. By the year 2020, it is predicted that the amount of information will double every seventy-three days (Grolier, 1995). Therefore, it is our job to make sure students are prepared to take on this surge of information and know what to do with it in the context of reading and writing.  Many instructional materials found in elementary classrooms are narrative (i.e., fictional) texts. The authors define narrative text as text that tell stories and are organized sequentially, with a beginning, middle, and an end.  The basic plan or story grammar, of narrative texts consists of such elements as characters, setting, plot and theme. The purpose of fiction is to be engaging and entertaining and involve the readers or listeners in stories about life, although the purpose of fiction can be to inform or persuade (Fountas&Pinnell, 2001).  Nonfiction is defined as a carefully crafted genre, provides ideas, facts and principals organized around main ideas, using both verbal and visual texts. To date, trends in classroom across the country use less expository text and students are far less familiar with expository writing and as a result have not been as successful reading and writing in this genre.

This brings me to our discussion about Rachel and Jeremy because; they too, struggled with using nonfiction text and navigating assignment expectations. They were told to focus on key words, look for important information, highlight as well as pick two ideas to discuss but really did not know how to do this even when scaffolding appeared to be happening during a lesson. This book enforces our discussion about the importance of teaching text features and teaching students from a particular Discourse to better understand how to read and write in a specific genre. (i.e. “What does a historian look like? What does a historian want to know?”) In this chapter, the authors created several graphs that outlined exactly what features to look for in expository text from organizational features to graphic/visual features. By outlining and organizing the content of nonfiction text, the authors believed this would better assist teachers in supporting students in learning expository text features. You could create this outline as an anchor chart, with your students, as you learn specific features. 

After class last week, I reevaluated how I would begin my interest reading groups. I know that my students have not experienced difficulties overall in filtering information, but I know I can do a lot better at teaching them about text structures, what nonfiction is and how we access information while reading and translate that into their writing. I want to pick one topic and work on researching this as an entire class so we can operate from a Discourse of historian, oceanographer, scientist, etc. I want to model how to read from the lens of that Discourse and then break up into smaller groups to work on a particular subject. My goal is that each student will gain a deeper understanding through guided collaboration. We can discuss our findings and difficulties as a group. I feel doing research, as an entire class the first time, can ensure students are the historians or scientist they need to be in order to truly understand the text and carry over the lessons and skillset into the next lesson or subject matter. Thoughts?