Jonathan Hunt, a California school librarian, has written an informative article in the May/June issue of “Horn Book” dealing with the issue of getting kids to want to read nonfiction. The Common Core State Standards mandate that “by fourth grade students will read a balanced ratio of fifty perfect fiction and fifty percent nonfiction for school reading assignments.” This percentage increases as students go through the grades, until “by grade twelve they are expected to read seventy percent nonfiction and thirty percent fiction.” Hunt is very much in favor of this shift toward nonfiction. What he would like to see is the day when students choose to read nonfiction not because they have to but because they want to.
He believes that students in his school choose to read nonfiction because they don’t have the reading skills to tackle an extended piece of fiction. Nonfiction page layouts which break up the text with visual art and books that lends themselves to browsing and skimming appeal to readers who may not have the concentration to focus on the actually reading of the text.
Another reason kids turn to nonfiction is because of the subject of a given book. Their interest is cars, baseball teams, etc. not the genre or the author. Unlike fiction, Hunt says, “There are no seminal touchstone works of nonfiction. There are no books that all young nonfiction readers have read, no books that bond them together.”
Hunt would like to see the field of nonfiction for students change. “We need a gateway drug for nonfiction; something that becomes a pop-culture phenomenon.” Series books have been a boom to fiction. Why not develop nonfiction series books for young readers? Why not have a series for jazz music, the American Revolution, medicine? Use the series format to truly develop the minute details of any subject. Hunt mentions Steve Sheinkin’s award winning book “Bomb” as an example of a topic that would fit a nonfiction series concept.
Accuracy and documentation, of course, Hunt says are important aspects of nonfiction, but what he feels is even more important is to cultivate is a lifelong love of reading, that includes a very heavy dose of nonfiction.