Fiction and Nonfiction Texts

Kindergarten ELL readers must be explicitly taught how to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction texts to increase comprehension. However, age appropriate nonfiction texts for young readers do not always have the text features that more advanced nonfiction books may use, like an index, graphs, tables or charts. There are other features that can help students determine if a book is fact or fiction, such as the type of graphics or visuals, the author’s purpose (Did the author write this book to teach us facts about something?) and if the book has characters and a plot.

Below, I have illustrated the similarities and differences between a fiction book, Falling for Rapunzel (which by the way is a MUST read for Valentine’s day, the kids love this book!), and a nonfiction book Now I know: Animals at Night. I chose a “Box and T” graphic organizer to present this information because this is a graphic organizer that I use with kindergarten students quite frequently.  The box is for identifying similarities and the T illustrates differences. This is a useful way to get young kids visualizing similarities and differences and can be a stepping stone leading to the venn diagram.

	Differences:
Falling for Rapunzel By: Leah Wilcox		Now I know: Animals at Night By: Melvin and Gilda Berger
Fiction		Non-Fiction
-bright, vivid illustrations   -setting   -plot   -humor   -theme or a moral   -characters   -relationships between characters   -problem, solution		-fact boxes: “Did you know?”   -Images with captions   -Bubbles with zoomed-in pictures for kids to take a closer look   -glossary   -bold, italicized and underlined words   -interesting pictures of real animals

 

 

Similarities

-title page   -students can make connections to both genres   -print is organized left to right (concepts of print for younger students)

Visuals can help the students to determine whether they are reading fiction or nonfiction. If the student sees real pictures or graphs, tables or charts to help explain information, then those can be clues that the book is nonfiction. If the student sees things that are make believe, like a dinosaur wearing clothes, then they will know that they are reading fiction.

While reading nonfiction, utilizing the glossary for unfamiliar words in addition to reading the words in context can help ELL students to help to better understand vocabulary.  The glossary could even be used to pre-teach vocabulary prior to reading the text and then referred back to throughout the book. 

Humor and the moral of the story may be more difficult for younger students to grasp and the teacher may need to ask guiding questions to help them uncover humorous situations in the book and the moral of the story.

I have found that providing students with questions that they can ask themselves while reading independently to determine whether the book is fiction or nonfiction is helpful. I model thinking aloud the questions and their answers. It is important that the student uses more than one text feature to determine its genre, because sometimes books possess features from both. Here are a few example questions and thinking aloud that I might model for students…

“Does this book teach me facts? Nonfiction books teach me facts about a topic.”

“Does this book have characters? If the book has characters that have a problem, it might be fiction.”

“Why did the author write this? If they wrote the book to teach me about something it might be nonfiction.”

“What kind of pictures do I see? These are pictures from a camera of things in the real world. This might be a nonfiction book. Or do these look like make believe drawings or paintings? Then it might be a fiction book.”