Best Books 2024: Nonfiction for kids

Reading aloud to my children is one of my favorite things. When I became a parent, I looked forward to sharing all my favorite picture books. I want my kids to have memories of bedtime stories and favorite characters. I built a huge collection of picture books for our shelves at home. I checked out stacks of beautiful picture books from the Toledo Library and took my kids to visit many of our Library branches. I pointed out new vocabulary words, asked lots of questions, and happily re-read their favorite books.

Then I began to learn about the importance of background knowledge. According to the Knowledge Matters Campaign, “Knowledge is like an interest-bearing savings account: the more you know, the faster you learn. Therefore, growing knowledge about the natural and human world in the early grades is an essential equity investment, and it sets the stage for a lifetime of critical inquiry and analysis.” It was time to make a change, so I started to intentionally add non-fiction to our stacks of Library books. Children’s non-fiction books are available on nearly every subject at a variety of levels and children’s librarians are experts at helping find “just right” books.

My daughter was interested in sharks. We borrowed books and became shark experts! Then we borrowed cookbooks, books about giraffes, weather, dinosaurs, and biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dolly Parton. She learned new words and new concepts which will help her as she read increasingly difficult text at school.

Adults encounter informational text far more frequently than narrative text in our daily lives. It’s important for the future success of readers that we teach children how to read and understand the complex structure of written informational text.