Having quality informational books in the classroom

Why Mama Bear's Porridge is So Cold: a scientific inquiry project Small Group Activity Science and Literature Activities Insects List of Nonfiction Tradebooks Return to Integrating Children's Literature and Scientific Inquiry

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We stress reading fiction as an aesthetic process, if children read for pleasure and insight they are much more likely to enjoy reading, and therefore read more -- becoming more experienced readers. If you try to draw facts from every book read with kids, led into an experiment with every book, test for information gleaned from every book…. it can kill the pleasure of literary experience. On the other hand, reading can and should be spontaneously interactive. Questions arise, past experiences are remembered and related to what is being read, and students become active in processing the "story" and interpreting information.

With this in mind the ways in which we use informational books and the way we facilitate connections between "story" and science can actually encourage and embody the principles of scientific inquiry.

Informational books can do more than present scientific information; they can embody the scientific method and familiarize students with observation, hypothesis, formulation, experimentation, recording and inquiry. They can create a dynamic view of science and portray scientific reasoning as a process. Quality informational books can be read for pleasure, and like all good literature can touch the heart and the imagination as well as the mind.

It is therefore important that children have available to them both fiction and informational books in which they encounter similar phenomenon, and ideas.

Elephants Swim (Linda Riley, illus. by Steve Jenkins) Introduces young children to concepts about animal behavior, and invites them to extend understandings of what animals do in another environment. Ends by inviting children to explore what they do in water.

Flashy Fantastic Rain Forest Frogs (Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, illus by Kendahl Jan Jubb). Begins by realting tropical frogs to frogs children in the U.S. are more likely to have seen first hand. Ends with the admission that no one knows exactly why frogs are dissapearing?

Bird Watching with Margaret Morse Nice (by Michael Elsohn Ross, part of a wonderful series of scientific biographies) begins with Can you remember the last time you watched a bird?… Do you have questions about what you saw? Imagine spending eighty years following your questions…" I really like this series because it shows scientists who are female, Latino, African American. These scientists are shown as children and the questions which led to their choosing to become scientists. They depict science as a process, and illustrate the intersections between science and society, and thereby allow kids to see themselves as possible scientists.

Ladybugology (also by Michael Elsohn Ross) goes on step further and after providing information, and activities and relating them to children's lives, a section is included in which children ask questions and then carry out the investigations. It ends with questions real kids might have and asks "What questions do you have?"

• Why Mama Bear's Porridge is So Cold: a scientific inquiry project
• Small Group Activity
• Science and Literature Activities
• Insects
• List of Nonfiction Tradebooks