The Narrative Side of Nonfiction

Readers have done lots of digging into nonfiction this year! Recently, we started to uncover another side of nonfiction, a genre called Narrative Nonfiction. These are true stories where we learn factual information, but they are told in the format of a narrative (story). We usually don't see many text features in them like we do in our "all about" books.

We can summarize a narrative nonfiction text in one sentence,
just like a narrative, by using the
"Somebody, Wanted, But, So" sentence frame.

We have also learned that narrative nonfiction, or biography, books can be divided into two piles: achievement texts and disaster texts. An achievement text will tell us how a character overcomes conundrums and obstacles to achieve something. In the beginning, we are usually introduced to traits of the character, sometimes shown through ministories about their childhood. The character usually goes on to use these trails to overcome difficulties. Disaster texts tell us about a situation that gets worse and worse for the character(s) and does not end well. We looked at the book, Pompeii: Buried Alive, and noticed some structures of a disaster text. It usually begins with an "all is well" mood, where the character is in a perfect environment. It gives us a sense that something is going to happen to ruin the perfection that is being described to us. The beginning of this book is all about the city of Pompeii and how daily life was moving on as normal. We could feel that something big was about to happen to make it a disaster text, and not an achievement! We used our reading sense!

Narrative nonfiction texts have underlying ideas. We
can uncover those ideas by investigating a character and
their choices, challenges, and lessons!

We have read MANY mentor texts to help us expand our reading minds into this genre! There are lots of biographies to explore, also! Some of us have realized that this is our favorite genre. It has definitely deepened our love of nonfiction!

The choices are endless when it comes to finding narrative
nonfiction in our classroom!

Readers, which books have you come to love in this unit? Has it opened your eyes to anything new? What are some cool things you have learned from reading these books?