Category — Non-Fiction for little ones

One Tiny Turtle, by Nicola Davies, is a non-fiction book about sea turtles, but this book is not as simple as that. Davies accomplishes what the truly great non-fiction picture book writers do: she makes a factual book read like a fictional story. Everything in the book is true; the turtle is not anthropomorphized in the least but. But at the same time it is a character in its own life story, and the language she uses to describe this wild animal’s life cycle is compelling and poetic. Here’s an example, where she is describing the Sargasso Sea:

Just beneath the surface
is a tangle of weed and driftwood
where tiny creatures cling.
This is the nursery of a sea turtle.

This is also a book that can be used on several different levels. The main text is like that of a picture book, but in sidebar text we also find out more about the sea turtle. If reading this to a 4-year old, you’d probably want to stick to the main text. But if reading it to a 7-year old, you could read both parts. It is a great read-aloud as well as a great non-fiction research text. Plus, the gorgeous illustrations, by Jane Chapman are realistic without being scientific, accessible but not cartoonish.

1st grade just finished studying bats and my contribution was to read Hello, Bumblebee Bat, by Darrin Lunde, which is a very fun little book about the smallest bat species in the world. We don’t have this book in our library, which is okay, because I read it on Lookybook, which is an AWESOME digital library of picture books that is completely free! It’s like having a whole other library at your fingertips.

Anyway, back to the book. Hello, Bumblebee Bat is a very simple little book featuring questions and answers about this species of bat, and the information is very nicely paired with excellent illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne. There’s not much text, but there’s enough to hit the high spots: bats live in colonies, bats sleep during the day, this kind of bat eats insects, and bats find food using echolocation. Great for kids who don’t know anything about bats, and great for reinforcing things they have learned. A great fiction picture book to pair with this is Stellaluna, since Stellaluna is a fruit bat and you could do a compare/contrast thing between the 2 kinds of bats.

We finished up our storytime by making bat finger puppets, which was a big hit, although it was a whole lot harder to get 1st graders to understand that in order to cut out half a bat (which you unfold to create a whole bat) it’s crucialnot to cut the crease!

I know I’m a week late for the Day of the Dead (El Dia de los Muertos), but at my school we’ve been celebrating all week long, and I probably will do some mini-celebrations this coming week as well. The school in which I work is 87% Hispanic, and the majority of our kids’ families come from Mexico or Central America, so studying Day of the Dead, while presented to the kids as studying the holidays of “other cultures” (that’s the curricular link), is actually putting a little time and energy into a holiday most of them are very familiar with. They LOVE telling me what they do in their families. They LOVE that I care what they think. And they also love reading books about it, because no matter what they might do in their family, the truth is that we are not in Mexico or Honduras or El Salvador, so we all can learn a little something about how it’s done in other places.

Day of the Dead, by Tony Johnston, is a great little (and I do mean little: it measures 5×5″) book in which a large Mexican family readies itself for the holiday. They cook, they shop, they prepare…all the while telling the childrenEspérense! Wait! Finally, the day comes and the family gathers up all the food and decorations and heads to the graveyard where they build an altar to their loved ones and finally have a feast.

It’s a beautifully illustrated book, and while small, can be used in an intimate setting or with a document camera, if you have one available. It’s not non-fiction, but it comes pretty close, since the plot is essentially festival preparations and then the holiday itself.

After we read this book we made masks of Senor Calavera, or, as some of the kids called him, Mister Eskeleto. You could also do some papel picado, since the cover and some of the interior illustrations are reminiscent of the traditional paper cutting craft. We topped off our Day of the Dead festivities with a great little music video called “Viva Calaca,” which the kids told me means living skeleton or living bones. Two warnings about this video: first, while highly entertaining, it’s also pretty violent (hey, we’re talking about the Day of the DEAD here) and even has a “sexy” moment; and two, the song will stick in your head AND NEVER LEAVE if you listen to it over and over again, as I did last week.

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Another excellent book for The Day of the Dead is Yuyi Morales’ book, Just a Minute. This book features Senor Calaveras (this is the Day of the Dead connection), who comes knocking on Grandma Beetle’s door, ready for her to come with him…but Grandma Beetle is too busy to come with him just then. She has way too much to do! Just a Minute’s subtitle is “A Trickster Tale and Counting Book,” and the fun part of the book is for kids to realize WHO is the trickster in the tale. They always guess that it’s Senor Calveras, but of course, it’s Grandma Beetle.

This book got a Pura Belpre medal for its illustrations. My favorite is Senor Calaveras having a temper tantrum when he realizes that he may never get Grandma Beetle to come with him.

This is a very fun book to read aloud because, in addition to the marvelous illustrations and Grandma Beetle’s innocent (?) trickiness, there is also a natural call-and-answer sequence to the book. I have the kids practice Grandma Beetle’s responses to Senor Calveras – “Just a minute!” a few times before we start, and they love yelling it out to him as he slowly loses his patience with the not-so-naive Grandmother.

To top off this book, you could do a Senor Calavera mask or a skeleton puppet or eat some of the delicious feista foods Grandma Beetle prepares, but I have a sequencing activity that the kids and I do together using our interactive whiteboard.