5 Kinds of Nonfiction – Evaluate Your Collection

Assess Your Collection with the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction

Since so many of you take time over the summer to evaluate and update your collections to make sure they will best serve your students, we wanted to remind you of the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction classification system, created by author Melissa Stewart.

The 5 Kinds of Nonfiction system helps librarians expand and balance their nonfiction collection to provide a broad array of titles that appeal to different types of readers. It also helps students select books they like, predict the type of information they will find in a book, and use the books for specific purposes. All Lerner nonfiction is classified according to this system, including upcoming fall releases!

Active nonfiction teaches skills that readers can use to engage in an activity. Craft books, cookbooks, books of scientific experiments all fall into this category. Here’s an overview of Active Nonfiction and a look at some of our best-selling active nonfiction titles!

This is a guest post by our publishing partner, Science Buddies, a website which offers hands-on science resources for home and school.

What can kids learn by dropping bouncy balls into a container filled with flour? This simple activity brings the formation of craters to life for kids. As they try balls of different sizes, they see science in action and add to the information they know about the world around them.

This spring, Lerner Publications launched a new active nonfiction series called Sports Coding Concepts, step-by-step guides for understanding and practicing coding fundamentals such as algorithms, looping, conditionals, and bugs and errors. These are completely unplugged coding titles, meaning readers don’t need a device or a screen of any kind to try out the projects themselves. This screen-free learning is great for parents and educators who are looking to keep their kids busy and active but unplugged (especially during distance learning!). These books are also a great demonstration of active fiction, one of the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction your collection should have.

This fall, Lerner published Girl Code Revolution and the Vidcode Coding Hacks series. These titles are active nonfiction, providing step-by-step instructions to create animations, filters, memes, and more, and provide an online sandbox so readers can practice what they’ve learned. Additionally, Girl Code Revolution highlights some of the amazing women coders that have existed throughout history and others that continue to influence the tech industry today.

To bring readers coding projects that were both challenging and fun, Lerner partnered with Vidcode, a coding platform specifically geared for young coders. To celebrate the launch of these new books, we invited Vidcode to share a little bit about themselves! Read on to learn more about them in their own words, as well as more about active nonfiction and its role in your book collection.