Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Non-fiction vs. Textbooks
While reading chapter 10 in our textbook for next week’s class, I started thinking about several points concerning children’s nonfiction that I hadn’t previously thought about. “You probably remember only isolated fragments of information from your elementary school textbooks…We learn best when our emotions are involved and when we are actively engaged, and we learn more readily when we pursue our own-rather than someone else’s interests” (261). We know that students enjoy learning more and are generally more successful when material is related to them in some way, so it makes sense that children respond better to engaging nonfiction literature as opposed to endless facts listed in textbooks. If nonfiction encourages a more meaningful experience and helps children retain information longer, why don’t we integrate them more into school curriculums and rely less heavily on dull textbooks? What do you think?
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3 comments:
Although I really enjoy non-fiction works as much as any other reader, I believe there are some things you cannot fully learn without reading textbooks. Personally I always enjoyed reading out of textbooks when I was younger, especially in History, and still do not mind it. I think as long as the teacher can make the topic of what you are learning fun and exciting, the "dullness" of textbooks never comes out. Also if the teacher shows ways of how the informational text can relate to children's lives as much as a non-fiction work can, I believe this can encourage students to relate what they read to their lives and enjoy the textbook.
As a young reader, I hated non-fiction, but I really enjoyed textbooks. Non-fiction seemed daunting to me. It was pages upon pages of text with no story at all. Textbooks, on the other hand, were colorful, filled with diagrams, photos, tables, and activities which made the dry material more palatable. Looking back, both ways to convey information have merit, different styles working for different material and for different types of students.
I think it would be a good idea to rely less on textbooks and have more non-fiction in the classroom! A child will learn better when they are interested in what they are learning. "Metaphor and discriptive language allow readers to link what they are reading about with what they already know" (261). I think this is a valid point in the fact that if the language is more directed to the child in the book they are reading, as the case in many appropiate non-fiction books,they will be more open and comfortable to learning new things from the material. Children will attempt to learn more when they can relate to the story and that's what non-fiction can do over a textbook.
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