Help Your Child Learn to Love Nonfiction

This post was sponsored by TIME For Kids.

“Eighty-five percent of what we read in life is nonfiction, yet most school reading programs use mostly fiction selections. But everyone knows that it’s nonfiction that prepares kids for the real world, where they will eventually raise families, vote and work,” notes Leanna Landsmann, author of the nationally syndicated education column “A+ Advice for Parents.”

To succeed on the new high-stakes assessment tests, kids must develop strong nonfiction reading skills. Mastering a love of nonfiction can make kids feel smarter and helps them become critical thinkers and competent citizens.

Since many kids associate nonfiction with “boring” textbooks, it’s up to us to get our children interested in—and excited about—the genre. News articles, atlases, almanacs, charts and graphs, restaurant menus, cookbooks, brochures, biographies, and websites focusing on a host of different subjects are fun to read and informative. Children should be given a chance to be exposed to them as part of their at-home learning experience.

Nonfiction satisfies children’s natural curiosity about the who, what, when, how and why of life—from how machines work to why the sky is blue. It provides kids with important background and contextual information, and helps them make sense out of complicated topics. Nonfiction brings history alive and makes science fascinating. It’s what enables children—and adults—to gather and process important information that affects us daily.

Simple Activities to Get Your Kids Interested

You can help your child develop a love of nonfiction as well as practice in processing information. Here are a few simple ideas and activities to get started:

• Team up to follow an instructional manual for putting a toy together or setting up an appliance or furniture. Understanding and following directions is a life skill that kids need to master.

• Go over the rules for how to play a new board game. Play the game together, referring back to the rules whenever necessary. Make sure your child processes the instructions on how to play the game.

• Check out websites about animals, sports, dinosaurs, foreign countries, or whatever subjects your child is interested in. Read the information together and discuss the facts you’re finding. Encourage your child to learn more about the subject by finding books to read or new sites to visit.

• Cook or bake together, following a recipe in a cookbook. Have your child explain the steps in order to you.

• Read a news story in your local paper or a website such as timeforkids.com. Then talk about why the event is important.

• Point out the differences between fiction and nonfiction. You could ask your child to compare the differences between his or her favorite fiction book and a newspaper article. What features does a newspaper or magazine article have that a storybook doesn’t? (There might be photos or a diagram or chart in the nonfiction piece. There may be subheads, headlines and captions to break up the pages and provide information.)

• Ask your child to list nonfiction materials he or she has read (biographies, books about animals, science, or space, web articles, newspaper or magazine articles, assembly instructions, traffic signs, atlases and almanacs). What are some of the amazing facts and information picked up in the reading?

• Visit your local library. If your child has a passion for sports or animals or technology or history, find books that satisfy that passion.

• Find answers to your kid’s questions. Read with him or her. If you’re looking for a good book to get started, TIME FOR KIDS, the publishers of the award-winning classroom current events magazine, has just come out with the Big Book of Why. It’s the type of book you and your 8 to 12 year old can enjoy together. The book is loaded with hundreds of questions that kids often ask (but adults can’t always answer) on a broad range of topics including animals, earth, space, people and places, science and technology, and history. Explanations are simply and clearly written and may spur children to want to read more about a particular topic.

Questions cover a host of subjects including: How are crocodiles and alligators different? Why can’t penguins fly? Why is a basketball hoop 10 feet off the ground? Why is the Statue of Liberty green? Who was the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500? Why did people build castles? Try our survey and see if you can answer a small sampling of questions (TFK Quiz). A glossary defines difficult words and suggestions for further reading are included.

Big Book of Why is filled with photos that draw kids in to the book. Try joining your child in reading parts of the book aloud and discussing the material, it may not only bring you closer together, it will let your child see that learning facts is not only important—it’s fun!

By encouraging and assisting your child to appreciate and process nonfiction materials you’re paving the way for a successful education and helping your child become a knowledgeable individual with a love of learning. And that, after all, is what we all want for our children.

Jonathan Rosenbloom holds a M.Ed. (with a concentration in reading) and has taught elementary school. He has been a writer and editor in educational publishing for 30 years. Rosenbloom is the editor of Time Learning Ventures, a division of TIME For Kids Media Group at Time Inc.

Editor’s note: Leave your thoughts and comments below and you could be a lucky winner of a copy of “Big Book of Why.”