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Biography: a detailed description of a person's life. It portray's a person's life experiences. These are written about someone's life by a different person (author).

Autobiography: A self-written biography

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(Auto)biographies can be used to teach students about history, and the struggles and accomplishments the people before us went through. For example, students can learn what it was like to be a slave in the south during the civil war. Or, they can learn about the Wright brothers who created the first airplane!

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By: Brad Meltzer, Illustrated by: Christopher Eliopoulus

This book teaches students about Anne Frank and her experience in the Holocaust. It teaches them about her struggles, and what her family had to go through to hide from the German's. Students will learn about the effect WW2 had on the Jewish population.

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Starstruck: The Cosmic Journey of Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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Starstruck: The Cosmic Journey of Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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This is a biography about an American astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He has inspired many young leaders to become scientists and astronomers. The book tells readers about the many accomplishments and discoveries by Tyson.

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writing that is based on real facts, events & people.

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How can this be used across content areas?

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There are many different ways non fiction could be used across content areas:

It could be used in Social Studies for many different things. For example, you could read a book teaching students about how our federal government is structured.

The class could read books about science topics. For example, you could read a book teaching students about the different planets in the solar system.

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"Nonfiction offers a great opportunity for children to summarize what they are reading and to form opinions. In many ways, nonfiction is the ultimate test of a reader’s comprehension, because it constantly tests the information already committed to memory."

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The Benefits of Nonfiction Books for Kids

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Nonfiction books don’t have to be for school work only. Explore the benefit of nonfiction books for kids and help your little ones develop strong reading skills.

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We the People: The United States Constitution Explored & Explained

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We the People: The United States Constitution Explored & Explained

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Written by: Aura Lewis & Evan Sargent, illustrated by: Aura Lewis

This book teaches students about the US constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Amendments. It also goes over how the constitution started and how it has evolved in order to serve the people over the many years its been around.

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By: Caryl Hart

This story is definitely geared towards younger students (preschool - first grade). It takes students on an adventure through space, using rhymes to teach the students about the planets in the solar system! This is a great introduction to the solar system for young readers.

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These are stories rooted in reality but with made up characters. It is meant to connect itself to an event or time in history while focusing on struggles for kids of today such as parent divorce, sibling issues, or relationship struggles.

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How can this be used across content areas?

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This could be used when working on Social Emotional Learning with students. If students are struggling with something specific, holding a grudge for example, you could read a book about holding grudges to the class.

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Why is it important to expose students to this genre?

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Why is it important to expose students to this genre?

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"...young children have an easier time exporting what they learn from a fictional storybook to the real world when the storybook is realistic."

This genre gives the teacher the opportunity to further teach their students about struggles they are facing.

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A few years ago, my daughter requested that her nightly lullaby be replaced with a bedtime story.

I was happy to comply, and promptly invented stories full of imaginary creatures in elaborate plots intended to convey some important lesson about patience or hard work or being kind to others.

But my daughter was not pleased. She had very particular ideas about what her bedtime stories should be about. She wanted stories about a little girl planning a birthday party. A human girl. A human girl about her age. And what fascinated her were the mundane details: the theme for the party, the location, who was invited, and (most importantly) what they had for dessert.

It turns out my daughter is not alone. Her passion for birthday partystories, in particular, may be somewhat idiosyncratic, but children often prefer the factual over the fantastical. And a growing body of work suggests that when it comes to storybooks, they also learn better from stories that are realistic. For example, preschool-aged children are more likely to learn new facts about animals when the animals are portrayed realistically as opposed to anthropomorphically, and they're more likely to apply the solution to a problem presented in a storybook to a new scenario when the storybook involves real people (as opposed to fictional characters) and a realistic plot (as opposed to a space adventure).

A new study by Nicole Larson, Kang Lee, and Patricia Ganea, forthcoming in the journal Developmental Science, reveals that learning about good behavior is no exception. When children read a realistic storybook about humans who shared, they were more likely to do so themselves.

In the study, 4- to 6-year-old children were read a story about sharing that featured either human characters or anthropomorphic animals. Both before and after the story, children had the opportunity to share stickers with other children. The number of stickers each child set aside for others provided a quantifiable measure of sharing.

The key finding was that, on average, children who heard the story featuring a human who shared increased the number of stickers they shared, whereas those who heard the story featuring an anthropomorphic animal that shared did not. In other words, young children applied the lesson from the story to their own behavior, but only when the story featured humans.

The researchers also found that when children in another group were allowed to choose whether to read the story about humans or the story about anthropomorphic animals, they had no reliable preference. This suggests that the story about humans wasn't more effective in promoting sharing simply because children found it more appealing, and also that children weren't reliably drawn to the more fantastical alternative.

The findings from the study reinforce the idea that young children have an easier time exporting what they learn from a fictional storybook to the real world when the storybook is realistic. The leap from a fictional human to a real one is simply smaller than the leap from an anthropomorphic raccoon to a human. But it could be that as children grow older they become better at making these leaps, or that parents can help them make the leaps more readily.

In a paper just published in the journal Cognition, for example, developmental psychologist Caren Walker and I found that prompting 5- and 6-year-old children to explain key events in a storybook made them better at extracting the moral of the story and then applying it to a real-world problem. This is something parents can do easily as they read storybooks with their children, asking them why (say) an anthropomorphic raccoon did or didn't share, and why other characters responded as they did. If the theory in our paper is right, this should help children relate the unrealistic aspects of the story to what they know about the real world, and thus appreciate the patterns that hold across both the fictional world of the story and the real world around them.

The lesson I've learned from research on children's stories is this: When my daughter asks for a (realistic) birthday party story tonight, I'll indulge her. It will be about a human girl who celebrates her 7th birthday. But it will also include some realistic problems with realistic solutions - and I'll throw in some lessons about sharing and some prompts to explain for good measure.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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In Children's Storybooks, Realism Has Advantages

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A few years ago, my daughter requested that her nightly lullaby be replaced with a bedtime story. I was happy to comply, and promptly invented stories full of imaginary creatures in elaborate plots intended to convey some important lesson about patience or hard work or being kind to others.

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Written by: Diane O'Neill, illustrated by: Brizida Magro

This story is about a girl and her mom that visit the food pantry on the weekend because they are struggling financially and don't have enough food at home. The girl runs into another student from school, and they look ashamed to be at the food pantry. The girl does her best to make the other child feel comfortable with the situation.

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Written by: Lid'ya C. Rivera, illustrated by: Nina Mata

This book is about a young girl who has a skin condition, vitiligo. This book is meant to promote self-love in students, and to appreciate the skin that they are in- no matter what! It teachers students to love their "flaws".

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a fictional story that takes place during a historical place or event.

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This can be used during social studies when learning about historical events.

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Explore reading basics as well as the key role of background knowledge and motivation in becoming a lifelong reader and learner. Watch our PBS Launching Young Readers series and try our self-paced Reading 101 course to deepen your understanding.

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Written by: Melanie Florence, illustrated by: Gabrielle Grimard

This story is about a little girl and her grandfather. She wants to learn about her grandfather's native language, Cree. But he tells her it was stolen from him when he was a young child. The two re-learn the language together.

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written by: Susan Lynn Meyer, illustrated by: Eric Velasquez

This story is about a girl in the south during times of segregation. She has grown out of her brother's shoes, so her and her mother go to the shoe store in town. They are turned away because of the color of their skin. Her and her mother collect old shoes and repair them to make them new again so that they can let the people in their community have the opportunity to try on shoes.

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literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm;

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It is a method for deepening comprehension and developing a level of empathy and knowledge that can be applied to real-world situations. Poetry can be used to informally assess science and math. It can help students link content areas.

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From activating prior knowledge to exploring language to capturing character, discover ten ways to integrate poetry into your language, reading, and writing lessons.

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By: Michaela Goade

This is a poetry book about a grandmother and grand-daughter who are very connected with nature. They sing about their connections with the earth. They have a love for the land and all it provides for them.

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By: Shel Silverstein

There are many different poems, many being silly or random. These poems are great for students to work on their fluency skills.

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the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth.

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Folklore can teach students important life skills such as showing/having empathy. They also teach students "good" morals. These are all things that can be touched on during Social Emotional Learning.

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Aishwarya Saminathan Wednesday, June 14, 2023

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Promoting Cultural Fluency through Folktales in Elementary Classrooms

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Stories have shaped our behavior for over a millenia. Learn about the power of storytelling and how it can create social cohesion, promote ethics, and strengthen the sense of togetherness in a community.

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By: Phoebe Wahl

A little girl searches for fairies in her backyard. As you go through the book, there are fairies hiding from her in plain sight (but she doesn't see them). The story is meant to show that there is magic all around us.

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By: Kolanovic Dubravaka

This is a classic story about a princess who can feel something in her mattress. She keeps requesting layers to be added, but keeps feeling something in the bed. It is a test to see if the princess is fit to be a queen.

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exotic locales, paranormal elements, and mythic origins

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This can be used to push students to think outside the box, and think more creatively.

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The world's most beloved fantasy tales, filled with poison apples, enchanted forests and wicked wizards, are more than just stories. Unfortunately, this isn't to say unicorns frolic in my backyard (although this has yet to be disproven.) Fables, fantasy novels, legends, fairy tales, myths and magic-filled stories are all powerful means of communicating important ideas and perspectives that transcend time and are relevant to the modern world. That being the case, why don't secondary schools and university literature programs include more fantasy literature in their curriculums?

NAGB and CCSSI Reading Recommendations and Standards
I'm sure you're all familiar with the common, typical required reading for English courses in both private and public schools such as Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo and Juliet to name a few. While these works are brilliant and an essential part of a child's growing familiarization and appreciation for literary classics, the absence of fantasy novels in these "common required reading lists" elucidates the transparent lack of literary equity among genres. The Common Core State Standards Initiative cannot mandate which texts must be taught but their adoption of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) advises teachers to adhere to their proportion of literary and informational texts that students ought to be reading. The NAGB, an independent, bipartisan organization that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, suggests that students should be reading 30% literary texts and 70% texts that are informational in nature by the 12th grade. This, consequently, leaves little room for the exploration of the fantasy novel in the classroom.

"The Father of Modern Fantasy," Tolkien, and the Importance of Allegory:
So, why the conspicuous neglect for the fantasy genre? Since the creation of the novel in circa the 18th century, fantasy has widely been considered frivolous and fruitless literature that promotes escapism in young readers. To say this is an egregious misconception would be an understatement. Fantasy bears the unique ability to aptly capture the essence of the cultural, moral and sociopolitical issues of society through allegory.

Take a look at J.R.R Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings; these fantastic tales are commonly regarded as an allegory for World War I. For example, the massive Mumakil, or Oliphaunts, described as " grey-clad moving hill[s]," flattening all that lie in their path are a reflection of the devastating power of the weaponry that developed throughout WWI, specifically, the tanks Tolkien found to bring immeasurable destruction. In fact, throughout his novels and the battles for Middle-earth, he describes the conflict through the lens of the citizens affected (wizards, elves, hobbits and dwarves alike) and their friendship, violence and loss in order to parallel the impact of war on society in the early twentieth-century.

Isaac Asimov, C.S Lewis and Barack Obama are among the countless historical figures and leaders who have been influenced by fantasy literature. In fact, Obama describes said fantasy literature as not just " adventure stories but they were stories that taught [him] about social problems. They taught [him] about how people interact with each other...about how some people are kind and some people are cruel." Reading allegorical novels such as Tolkien's trilogy, thus, proffers both children and adults a unique, fresh perspective on war, conflict, society and politics that are both enjoyable and educational.
Carroll and the Victorian Age Commentary:
Image Credit: Scott McKowen - The Queen of Hearts playing croquet, an illustration from the Sterling edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Let's shift over to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a novel by Lewis Carroll, often regarded as a fantastical examination of the trends, culture and philosophy of the decadent Victorian era. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed The Important of Being Ernest and Oscar Wilde is stiff competition when measuring the effectiveness of Victorian Age commentary, but Alice's Adventures in Wonderland brilliantly illustrate the hilarity of societal decadence in the nineteenth-century that inspired me to investigate the era myself. For example, the tale is considered a political allegory wherein Wonderland is symbolic of England and, of course, the tyrannical Queen of Hearts is none other than Queen Victoria herself. More specifically, the ridiculous and absurd trial Alice faces before the Queen of Hearts is an allegory for the chaos of the British Justice System at the time. In fact, the vanity of the talking flowers and their emphasis on Alice's outward appearance and thus, her social standing, mirrored Carroll's concerns for the vast dependency on materialism during the nineteenth-century. As a high school student and, now, as a University student, I find this sort of allegory to be highly effective, communicating the author's thoughts and concerns on the monarchy, culture, and society whether they be negative, positive or a call for change. In fact, I felt inspired to read, write and continue to learn about not only fantasy as a genre but society itself and how it is echoed through the imagination.
The Hunger Games; a Modern Day Message
More recently, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, has gained quite a bit of traction with young and old readers alike. The novel takes place in what was once North America where the Capitol of Panem controls its 12 districts, forcing its citizens to select a boy and a girl as Tribute. These Tributes compete in a nationally televised event called the Hunger Games for life and death. Collins' novel is popularly regarded as a commentary on the " federal public corruption" within the United States. This novel, allegedly, parallels the U.S government's current moral degeneracy and abuse of power through the wicked and tyrannical characterization of the Capitol. The author's cleverly designed dystopian future is, thus, intended to familiarize young readers with a potentially similar fate in order to help prevent said outcomes from occurring at all. This is similar to novels like 1989 by George Orwell and The Road by Cormac McCarthy whose narratives craft a hyperbolic, hell-ish world to warn younger generations. Therefore, the novel provokes thoughtful and pertinent commentary on issues that are hotly debated worldwide. Whether the reader agrees with the message or not, the reader inevitably gains new insight and perspective on relevant current events and situations that, otherwise, may have been overlooked.

The Power of Fantasy Literature in the Classroom:
While Tolkien and Carroll establish a high standard for fantasy literature and allegory, there are countless other novels, trilogies, epics, plays, and fairy tales that are equally as advantageous to both a child and adult's education. These stories engender creativity and proffer a broader perspective on literature, wherein children and adults are free to explore not only informative texts or realistic (novels that are fiction but adhere to the laws of nature and reality) but fantasy as well. In fact, a student's investigation of fantasy as allegory and social commentary places new emphasis on the value of subtext and the ability of an author to capture the mood and voice of a population during periods of historical significance. Moreover, the genre is capable of providing bold and unrelenting commentary, veiled with magic and myth wherein the truth or, at least, the opinions held by society or a segment of society are given a voice through the fantastic. Thus, children and adults are given an accurate, creative, and fresh perspective on the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of society throughout history.
A Call to Action:
Lastly, fantasy not only proffers insightful social commentary, but it also inspires readers to stand up for their beliefs and take humanitarian action. For example, J.K Rowling's series, Harry Potter, is widely regarded as bearing apt social commentary on slavery through the characterization of House Elves and, more specifically, Dobby. Rowling's poignant commentary on slavery through her fantasy novel, has inspired a fan activist group known as " Dumbledore's Army for our world," founded by Andrew Slack, co-founder of The Harry Potter Alliance. The group uses J.K. Rowling's books as the basis for their social justice campaigns, recently engaging in a multiyear campaign against Warner Bros., who are allegedly using child labor to harvest the cocoa contained in chocolate frogs produced and distributed by Warner Bros. under the Harry Potter brand name. The activist group, therefore, has and continues to be inspired by Rowling's novels, elucidating the positive impact of the fantasy genre on its audience. In other words, fantasy is capable of more than just entertaining and educating its readers but also of inspiring others to pursue justice, take action and advocate for their beliefs amidst the world's most pertinent social issues.

An Educator's Role in Teaching Fantasy Literature:
At this point, you may be wondering why fantasy literature is not left for recreational reading. Students at both the high school and higher education levels need to be given the tools to examine fantasy literature analytically: to learn to identify metaphor, symbolism, themes, motifs, parody, satire and couple these written clues with historical periods and significance. Fantasy in the classroom also challenges students to think outside of the box and beyond the surface level meaning wherein they delve into the intentions of the writer. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, giving students literature that inspires them and encourages them to read and write will inevitably improve teen and adult literacy. In fact, the top ten nominations from the Young Adults Library Services Association for the past several years have majorly been fantasy novels. Equipping students with materials that are not only educational but enjoyable, will inspire young and old readers to explore literary genres as a whole.

If there are teachers or schools who are unsure how to teach fantasy literature in the classroom, there are a multitude of written and online sources to help do so. Below are a list of resources for schools, institutions, teachers and professors alike to make the transition from solely classic and general fiction novels to fantasy novels that encourage and inspire students of all ages.
Resources:
Teaching Fantasy Novels: From The Hobbit to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fireby Phyllis J. Perry
" Fantasy Books: There's a Whole Other World Out There" by Karlene McGowan
" Using and Enjoying Fantasy In The Classroom" by Dr. Burnett and Julia Figliotti
A Quick Guide to Teaching Reading Through Fantasy Novels, 5-8 by Mary Ehrenworth
" A Vehicle for Learning as Well as a Vehicle of Temporary Escape and Adventure:Fantasy Literature Fulfills both! " by K I R K D . P L E A S A N T

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The world's most beloved fantasy tales, filled with poison apples, enchanted forests and wicked wizards are more than just stories. This isn't to say unicorns frolic in my backyard (although this...

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By: Tomi DePaola

This is a story about a knight and a dragon. The only thing is that they are both shy and sheepish. The dragon retreats to his castle to dig through the belongings of his ancestors in order to learn how to fight a knight successfully.

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Written by: Judi Barrett, illustrated by Ronald Barrett

The town Chewandswallow gets weather 3 times a day. But instead of regular weather, they get food with their weather. The town goes through a flood that they need to fix before it causes too big of a mess.