Four Literary Nonfiction Teaching Strategies

If you’ve had a chance to check out my Nonfiction and Literary Nonfiction Book Clubs Unit, then you know how complex nonfiction can be so I breaking down Four Literary Nonfiction Teaching Strategies that get results.

When I first started teaching literary nonfiction analysis, I had almost no resources.

Every time I looked for resources, it was a lot of elementary nonfiction teaching strategies.

I wanted to make sure you had everything you needed in case you needed to start teaching it tomorrow.

I also want to make sure you teach in a way that eliminates your students saying things like, “I don’t know what I am supposed to do…” ????

THE WORST. Right?

These are some of teaching strategies I learned while teaching nonfiction reading for five years.

These strategies are also broken down in my HUGE 25-lesson Nonfiction and Literary Nonfiction Book Clubs Unit.

Let Students Pick Their Literary Nonfiction Texts

If you look at the nonfiction reading unit, you see that I give three different examples of literary nonfiction mentor texts.

Each could be used in 6th, 7th, and/or 8th but they also show the variety of literary nonfiction and show students different examples.

I always try to get my students into book clubs based on their choice of literary nonfiction texts I have available.

This is because the more buy-in students have, the more quality of reading and writing you’re going to get out of them.

If you have the ability and time to let them pick their own text, you will see an immediate return in their writing results.

Use My FREE Nonfiction Reference Booklet

I know I keep talking about this free booklet, but literary nonfiction analysis is complex and it has a lot of steps when broken down.

It has a lot of components students need to internalize to be able to apply it to their reading and analysis.

This booklet gives them so many tools to be independent nonfiction reading and writers.

It’s also a great teacher tool because you can remind them to check it if they have a question related to its contents!

 Model, Model, and Model Some More

I’ve said this before, but I truly believe this is the reason my students’ ELA proficiency scores increased so drastically in just two short years. I modeled everything I did right in front of them and/or I created examples of EVERYTHING.

They were never stuck on what to do, read, or write because I always had an example for us to look at together.

Let Students Work in Partners

I talk about this in my Nonfiction and Literary Nonfiction Book Clubs Unit, but partner work during essays will change your life.

Ever had a student say:

“I don’t understand how to find the central idea.”

“There isn’t any text evidence.”

“I don’t know what else to write.”

Partners will change your classroom forever.

I try to have every student read the same text as another classmate. But partnerships can work even without the same texts.

Any time students have a question like this, I can simply say, “Why don’t you ask your partner what they determined from their text?”

They can now ask their partner.

And I can make sure I am able to help a lot more students each class period.

If you’re like, okay this all sounds amazing >> CLICK HERE << to check out the full Nonfiction and Literary Nonfiction Book Clubs Unit