Easy Reader Nonfiction coming soon to the Easy Reader shelves
Posted on January 29, 2019 at 6:00 am
By Sheri Boggs
Big changes are afoot in our Easy Reader section! Elephant & Piggie, Daniel Tiger, Amelia Bedelia, Little Bear, Frog and Toad, and Fancy Nancy will soon be making room for true stories about otters, astronauts, WWE stars, and more as we launch our newest collection: Easy Reader Nonfiction.
While we’ve always had easy nonfiction, it hasn’t always been easy to find in our Children’s Nonfiction section, which serves kids from birth through age twelve.
Usually, parents and kids would need to have a topic in mind first—say, whales or bees—and then look for easy readers that are mixed in with books designed for older kids or to be read aloud by an adult.
Our new Easy Reader Nonfiction section will be located right next to the regular Easy Reader section and will be easy—and fun!—to browse. And like the rest of our readers, the nonfiction readers will be leveled on the four-step continuum from easiest to hardest.
In addition to being easier to find, our Easy Reader Nonfiction books will go a long way towards supporting the Common Core State Standards, with the emphasis on understanding and integrating informational texts. As Barbara Moss points out in her article “Making Independent Reading Work” on the Reading Rockets website:
“…students need to read from many different genres including informational trade books, newspapers, magazines, online resources, primary source documents, plays, poems, graphical texts, and biographies. Most experts recommend that classroom libraries include 50% literary texts and 50% informational texts.”
We’ve also learned that some kids aren’t as interested in stories—they’re really here for the facts.
With our nonfiction easy readers all together on the shelf, these kids might be looking for books on trains or dinosaurs and suddenly find fascinating new topics to explore, for instance space travel or prehistoric mammals.
As we busily get everything ready for our Easy Reader Nonfiction collection to launch in early February, we’re rediscovering awesome easy series we already own, for instance “Fly Guy Presents,” in which everyone’s favorite winged narrator introduces such topics as firefighters, garbage, and space. The “Living In…” series from Simon Spotlight is a great introduction to places like India, Italy, and Brazil. And Alyssa Satin Capucilli, creator of the beloved Biscuit series, has also created an engaging series of “My First…” books covering things like gymnastics, soccer, and ballet.
We’re also ordering lots of new nonfiction, including the latest “Tails From History” book, The Cat Who Ruled the Town, about a friendly ginger tomcat elected mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, and the Ranger Rick “I Wish I Was a…” series for readers who want to know what it’s really like to be a polar bear, an elephant, or a gorilla.
It is our hope that you’ll be as excited by this new collection as we are, and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments. And be sure to let us know if there are easy reader topics you’d like to see!
Tags: books, early learning, easy reader books, easy reader nonfiction, easy readers, informational reading, just right books, kids, learning to read, new readers, nonfiction, parents, reading, teachers
