Using Literary Nonfiction with Social Studies

Kirsten 1:06

This is the social studies teacher podcast a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know if you southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

Hey there and welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher podcast. As always, I am super glad to have you here. Listening to this episode. Today's episode is all about literary nonfiction in social studies. In this episode, we are going to talk about what literary nonfiction is some characteristics of this genre, some examples of literary nonfiction, some recommendations, why it's important and also some activity ideas that you can implement in your classroom.

So before we jump into how you can integrate this genre with social studies, let's make sure we're all on the same page. Literary nonfiction, often referred to as narrative nonfiction, is a genre that blends factual information with narrative storytelling techniques, such as plot characterization, setting, and figurative language. And this is all related to a story about someone's life. So it's telling us nonfiction story telling a true story about a person's life.

So let's talk about some characteristics of literary nonfiction. The purpose is to provide details regarding the life of a person in an entertaining, honest and informative way. By the end, a reader will feel like they are well acquainted with the subject or the person or maybe even the situation that they were involved in. Literary nonfiction weaves actual events together with different literary devices that bring the story to life. It's a true story, and it makes it seem like you're reading a fiction novel of some sort because of how its laid out. It's not a boring article or newsletter about the person's life. The major players in the experience become characters, the place where it happens becomes real and vivid. And the dialogue reveals relationships between the author and the people encountered. This genre uses a novel like format so that the story is more entertaining. And readers usually will find very similar plot structures or if you're thinking, you know, the exposition, rising conflict, climax, falling action and the resolution, you're going to see those plot elements in those types of stories.

All right, there are three types of literary nonfiction types, as we'll call them.

The first type would be a biography. This is an account or a detailed description about the life of a person. It includes facts such as their childhood education, career, relationships, family and death. And a biography also portrays the experiences and events which occurred in the life of the subject. And it's usually presented in chronological order, an example of biographies that comes to mind or the who was series, it is laid out in a chapter book format. And while it's not super, you know, filled with literary elements that we might see in fiction novels, there is that element where it is kind of like a story, the narrator is talking and telling the story about that person. And sometimes the way they add additional details or connections is just kind of a way to make it a little bit more entertaining for those readers. So I really liked the who was books, usually you'll hear third person point of view in that where you're referring to the author is referring to he or she or they and they are talking about another person about another person's life.

An Autobiography will tell the story of a person's life and is told in their own words. So this will be in first person point of view. And you want to make sure to point that out to your students is the difference between biography and autobiography is who's telling the story, biography tends to be in third person point of view. And then auto biography tends to be in first person point of view. Some examples of autobiographies are I am Ruby Bridges written by Ruby Bridges, and also Malala has magic pencil written by Malala yousufzai. So that's just something to think about is you can always showcase literary nonfiction in the form of an autobiography.

The third type of literary nonfiction is a memoir. The writer also narrates this him or herself, and they are talking about details of a particular event or situation that occurred in his or her lifetime. So they're not telling details of their whole life story. They are just really zoning in on one particular moment. One example would be Raina Telgemeier I love her books. They're graphic novels. And she's come out with books such as smile, sisters, and guts. And each of these three have kind of gone into Memoirs of specific times of her life when she experience for example, for smile, it's mainly kind of going into the whole part of her life when she had braces, sisters goes into her relationship with her sister. So there's a lot of different, really great lessons to be learned and my students loved her books. So I definitely recommend Raina Telgemeier for you know those memoir, literary nonfiction novels, and also The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba, this true story follows a young boy in Malawi. And this is, you know, written by William Kamkwamba, the person in the story. He's bringing a windmill to bring electricity to his village. This is kind of on the border between autobiography and memoir. I would probably say it could be an autobiography, a little bit more so than a memoir, but he does hyper focus on specific times in his life. So yeah, if you ever read that it's a really great read.

Let's talk about some ideas to teach literary nonfiction.

This first idea is a literary nonfiction sort. This is an anticipatory set where you're showing what you know, and you're going to have students try to sort out the three different types of literary nonfiction. So here's how it works. So you're going to find two excerpts of each of the following biography, autobiography. And memoir can be anything. Obviously, you want it to be from an actual novel or picture book. Just take a paragraph from that to biographies to autobiographies to my memoirs, put it in quotation marks. And then you can have a total of six excerpts typed up on one page. So you have it spaced out, there's six of those excerpts on the page, printed out and make enough copies so that you can cut out and give the six excerpts together to students in groups of two to three then have those students determine whether they think an excerpt is a biography or an autobiography or memoir, and in their groups as they're sorting them, have them discuss why they think this is the case. And again, this is all before you are teaching anything about literary nonfiction. And then you want to meet back as a group and go over the correct answers. So I'm going to quickly model what this would look like, I'm going to pretend you as the listener, our student and I am the teacher. Alright guys, today, we are going to do a little activity I have for you in a plastic bag, six excerpts from a variety of texts. And I want you we're gonna get into groups of two and three, I want you to take a look, read each of those little paragraphs and decide where you think they belong. Do you think it's a biography? Do you think it's an autobiography? Or do you think it's a memoir? Now, we are going to go over this together, I'm gonna give you about five to 10 minutes to look at it and sorted as a group and decide where you think they best fit. Alright, let's talk about an idea that you can incorporate during your literary nonfiction unit. After you might have done a mini lesson or mentor texts, introducing the three different types of literary nonfiction and characteristics of literary nonfiction, just as I mentioned to you in this episode, so how you can go about doing this is grabbing, either on you know, places like mine, or even epic. This is a free online source for teachers. If you have not heard of epic, it's an amazing, amazing online library of books. And just pick and pull different types of literary nonfiction texts, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, picture books, novels, just a host of different books. And you can have students select books of their choice, you can have them, you know, have different groups select a specific book, depending on how you want to differentiate that and give them some activities that will guide them in understanding the text and actually picking apart the texts looking for different elements of literary nonfiction.

So one activity idea would be to have students create a timeline. Another idea would be to have them create a newsletter using information and facts about the person's life. Another really easy activity is to have students read about that person and record important and interesting facts about the person's life. It could be eight facts, 10 facts, just really short facts about that person's life. The fourth type of activity that you could do is to have students write a summary, have students you know, thinking about because this is a literary nonfiction, it'll follow very similar structures to fiction text that you can use that somebody wanted. But so then, so thinking about, number one, who is the subject of the biography or autobiography, wanted, what did the person want? But what struggles or challenges did the person have? So how did the person overcome their challenges? Then? What is the person best known for? How is the person famous so they can answer all those questions and then create a summary.

Now I do offer a literary nonfiction graphic, organizer resource with all of these activities I mentioned, as well as several others. So you don't have to worry about writing it down. You can easily just print it and assign it and it can be used literally for any literary nonfiction text, so it's a really great resource. And I will make sure to link that in the show notes. But it is available in my TPT store. All right. Now the third and final idea I have for you for teaching literary nonfiction is probably my favorite. And that is to create a literary nonfiction lapbook. This would be towards the end of a unit. This can be for a summative grade, and It's project based. So what you would be doing is have students complete a biography or autobiography lapbook. For a historical figure of their choice, they would check out a book from the library, or they can research this information, using their research and inquiry skills on a source that you prefer. There's several sources that I really love, such as Britannica, kids, and also even National Geographic Kids has some, but there is an episode I did talk about research and just different sources you can utilize. But wherever it is, they're going to find some type of biography, or I think this project particularly works best with biographies, but you can just use any nonfiction or literary nonfiction text with a historical figure or a famous person. And then they are going to include different information, such as the person's name, maybe a famous, quote, an illustration, or photograph of that historical figure, some facts about the historical figure when they were a child. What would their family like? Did they have parents, brothers, sisters, or children? Are they married at some point? What were their accomplishments that they achieved? Why are they famous, some additional interesting facts, and some important events listing a timeline of their life, including yours and events? So those are just some ideas of how you can do it. My students have done this in the past and you give students an outline of questions to answer related to literary nonfiction. And you can always add in or take out questions based off of what I just gave you and mentioned. And then you want to make sure that you check their answers, just making sure you know, having like some type of teacher conference, one on one with the student, or just having a check in with the teacher, before they go on and create the final version of their lap book, I always have students just take, you know, those long rectangular construction paper sheets, and I had them fold them into thirds. And they would create their biography, lap books, and I loved how it was all student created. I know there are templates out there, if you want to do lap books, but I kind of like the, you know, rustic, you know, fun of how you have these different lap books and how they turn out. And of course, me might have to guide some students depending on you know, maybe they need some extra assistance. And if that is a case, one of my best recommendations is to just give, maybe you have a few students who need more support, extra support, give them a, you know, a shorter passage or text about a person's life. And they are all reading the same one, they're doing it together. And actually, this is what I would do, I would pull students in a small group. And we would all read the same book that of course we're all interested in. And we would go through the different questions and talk about it like, you know, like, okay, let's draw a picture of this person. Now let's talk about what happened when they were a child, what are four or three facts about what happened to this person as a child? So that's just something to think about is making sure you modify and adjust accordingly with your students.

All right, well, I did mention that I do have the literary nonfiction graphic organizers. And if you are looking for specific passages or text about famous people, I do have a bundle of biography passages and questions on famous figures in black history. There's 25 famous figures that you can utilize and pick from, which is of course really great for this time of year, because it is almost black history month at the time of this recording. So I will make sure to link that resource as well.

All right, hopefully this was a jam packed episode where you can take away and implement. Of course, I cannot in this episode without mentioning of why literary nonfiction is so beneficial, especially if If you are teaching ELA in social studies, it's literally one of the most easiest ways to integrate two different subjects at a time because you've got the social studies component of these famous people in history. Or maybe they were important to some government or culture and how they grew that culture. And maybe they were important entrepreneurs in the economic sense. So that and weaving it in with reading and understanding the specific characteristics of this specific genre is just a really easy way to tie it all up in a nice, neat bow.

So hopefully, this episode gives you some extra tips on that. All right. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and I will talk to you again next week. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.

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