Week of October 12th: Nonfiction Literature

   This week in class we talked about nonfiction literature. That's also what Chapter 11 in our textbook was about as well. I learned that the purpose of nonfiction literature is to inform. It gives readers a chance to find the answers to questions that they may have, in addition to allowing them to gain experiences that helps build their personal knowledge. Even though nonfiction may appear to be boring, a lot of children actually enjoy reading it.
   My husband is one of those people that really enjoys reading nonfiction. In fact, I don't think that I've ever seen him read a book that was not nonfiction. He loves history and is always eager to learn more about it, so the books that I have caught him reading are often about important figures in our history, and a lot about the world wars. He is proof that there actually are people out there that enjoy reading nonfiction, and thus I realize that I need to have nonfiction books available in my classroom library.
   I also learned that there are broad categories of nonfiction writing. These categories include things such as factual nonfiction and interpretive nonfiction. Factual is more on the "straight fact" side of non-fiction, while interpretive allows the author to indulge the reader in a more of a journey with a little bit more of their interpretation involved.
   One aspect of nonfiction literature that we spent a good deal of class time focusing on this week was a genre of nonfiction called "fictionalized nonfiction." This is a genre that has the purpose to inform, but uses fictional elements throughout the book. It is, in fact, different from historical fiction. I can see how those two genres might be similar, but I think that fictionalized non-fiction would contain more extraordinary elements. In class, we had a debate involving the pros and cons of using fictionalized nonfiction in the classroom as teachers. Both sides had good points. A pro would be that it might interest children more than straight non-fiction would. A con would be that children could have a difficult time distinguishing fact from fiction.
   I decided to look a little bit further and see what books are classified as fictionalized nonfiction, so that I may have a better grasp of the genre. The books below are a few fictionalized nonfiction books that I discovered. They are from a goodreads list of fictionalized nonfiction books. I am not sure if this is truly what fictionalized nonfiction is supposed to be, but it's what I found!