Fostering a Love for Nonfiction
A new book by SED’s Carol Jenkins helps primary-school teachers introduce nonfiction writing.
Carol Jenkins, an associate professor of curriculum and teaching at the School of Education and program coordinator for the Elementary Education Program, recently coauthored a book that helps primary-school teachers introduce nonfiction writing to their students.
Nonfiction Author Studies in the Elementary Classroom, by Jenkins and Deborah White, is a compilation that walks teachers through various instructional strategies and activities for bringing nonfiction into the classroom. “Helping kids become strong readers and writers of nonfiction is extremely important not only for their academic success, but also for their future careers,” Jenkins says. “And it has to start at the elementary level so you can foster a love of nonfiction literature, and kids will feel as at home with nonfiction as they feel with fiction.”
Jenkins developed the idea for the book after teaching a course on the connection between nonfiction literature and literacy skills in children at the Massachusetts Department of Education’s Content Institutes, a statewide program of free graduate-level courses for educators. She assigned her teachers to choose a well-known nonfiction author such as Jean Fritz — who has written more than 30 historical nonfiction books for children, including And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? — and design a study that analyzed the works and the writer. “Their studies were so wonderful that I thought we should publish them,” says Jenkins, who had the teachers include booklists, biographical information, and student samples in the compilation. “It’s really their ability to take this one person who has published wonderful works and help kids come inside this literature, both from the standpoint of how nonfiction is crafted and who these writers are.”
Jenkins believes that children learn to write well by reading and analyzing the techniques of good writers, and she stresses the benefits of choosing the works of one writer in the classroom. “We need to immerse the children in as much nonfiction as we can,” she says. “And it’s great to do it with one author, because the writing style is the same from book to book.”
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.