Nonfiction Bug

6 Ways To Get Rid Of The Nonfiction Bug In Grade School

Teaching nonfiction writing to Young learners who have been immersed in storytelling/fiction writing can be a daunting task.

If you teach Creative Writing or Composition as you nay call it in your school, then take your time to read this article. Your next writing topic might be nestled in here.

Research Findings:
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2019 report on writing in the US found:
- 8th-grade students scored lower in informative/explanatory writing (22% proficient) compared to narrative writing (27% proficient).

- A 2020 study in the Journal of Literacy Research: Revealed that middle school students' nonfiction writing quality improved when taught explicitly, but still lagged behind fiction writing.

Common Challenges:
a. Lack of prior knowledge and experience with nonfiction texts.
b. Difficulty organizing and structuring information.
c. Struggling to integrate evidence and supporting details.
d. Limited vocabulary and sentence structure.

The last challenge above could be seen as the most disturbing of them all. The learners grapple with using the right language (words) because they have become accustomed to a limited storytelling language.

They get stuck in the Nonfiction writing maze where you hear them whine and say, "I don't know what to write!" or "I don't know how to begin!"

How do you tackle these challenges?

There is no-one-size-fits-all solution for writing challenges, but there are proven and tested approaches that could help.

I have listed a few of my own approaches from experience and I believe that if applied accordingly, they could help grade school learners thrive in their nonfiction writing.

1. Wean and guide learners into differentiating between terms like, fiction and nonfiction, real and not real, familiar and unfamiliar, facts and opinions.

2. Learners should know the difference between casual and formal language in writing. Introduce this with words like playful and serious writing.
As they go up the grades (KS2-3), introduce them to "technical words" used in particular writing genres.

3. Help them see and differentiate between the structural and language features of different Nonfiction texts.

For example, you do not begin a Recount same way as a Persuasive Text. Expository writing, Explanation writing and Instructions/Procedural writing are quite different in structure and language. Historical fiction is different from Historical writing. A Personal Narrative is not an Autobiography.

4. For English as a Second and Foreign Language Learners, ensure that they engage in projects that allow them express themselves in written and spoken form.

Projects like making grocery shopping videos or a vlog titled "A Day In the Life of an ESL Learner" would allow them use quite a number of words that are particular to subject matter.

5. Nonfiction writing in grade school must not always be hinged on boring topics like "How I spent my last holiday", "My best friend", "My school", " What I want to be when I grow up" or worse, "Private schools are better than public schools".

As much as these topics are great conversation starters and foundational topics to introduce nonfiction writing, they have become clichés.

Moreover, they do not really prepare these young learners for the future, which would include but would not be limited to Academic Writing, Creative Nonfiction and Research Writing.

Take a look at these topics:
👉Exploring Child Trafficking (Expository writing),
👉A watermelon affair (Instructions)
👉AI Vs Human Writing: A Critical Analysis (Persusaive Text-Journalistic Writing/Balanced Argument
👉My Buddy Al (Biography)
👉Queen Amina and Her Men (Historical Writing)
👉Authentically Me (autobiography).

The above titles are bound to spark up conversations amongst peers and build curiosity. This would propel the learners to research and write their hearts out after you have guided them on the basic text structure and language.

6. One critical approach to teaching Nonfiction writing would be to ecourage learners to read a wide range of nonfiction texts in their spare time and during restricted/structured reading sessions.
This will expose them to the different ways they can tackle Nonfiction writing.

Teaching Nonfiction in grade school is a function of the exposure to nonfiction text language and structure. To practice, learners must have guided and unrestricted writing sessions. They should be given the freedom to independently produce their own nonfiction writing.

Learners should be encouraged to develop a consistent reading culture, in order to attain a certain level of writing prowess.

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