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!

Browseable nonfiction contains eye-catching design, lavish illustrations or photographs, and straightforward text. The books can be read from cover to cover for readers who want to know absolutely everything, but other readers have the freedom to focus on the content that really interests them. Read on for our best-selling browseable nonfiction titles!

By Andrea Nelson, Associate Managing Editor of Partnered and Packaged Product

This spring, Lerner Publications launched the browseable nonfiction series Animals Eat What? This series takes a look at the nasty and unusual elements of animal diets, and fits into the browseable category of Melissa Stewart’s Five Kinds of Nonfiction. Read on to learn more about these awesomely disgusting books, and the just-plain-awesomeness of browseable nonfiction.

A guest post by Melissa Stewart

Many teachers and students seem to think that writing nonfiction requires nothing more than doing some research and cobbling together a bunch of facts, but nothing could be further from the truth. To dispel this alarming myth, fifty of today’s most celebrated authors for children have come together to share a critical part of the nonfiction writing process that often goes unseen. The result is the illuminating anthology Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep: 50 Award-winning Children’s Book Authors Share the Secret of Engaging Writing

To craft high-quality prose, nonfiction writers have to dig deep. They have to get in touch with their passions and their vulnerabilities and use them to fuel their work. Each book has a piece of the author at its heart, and that personal connection is what drives writers to keep working, despite the inevitable obstacles and setbacks.

Last week, Melissa Stewart hosted an absolutely awesome webinar with SLJ – Rethinking Your Book Collection. If you missed it, you can watch it on demand through the end of the year. The presentation and discussion were so great that we couldn’t get to all the questions, so Melissa graciously answered them for our blog.