From our whole group memoir mini-lessons and from our independent reading immersion and close study of chosen literary nonfiction, we've created this noticings chart of the literary nonfiction genre.

Class Literary Nonfiction Noticings Chart 

*An idea for using this genre with students, is to use a storyboard like you would with a multimedia project such as moviemaker or photostory3 where students can write thier text and their ideas/sketches for their images at the same time.

*In, "An Egg Is Quiet", the author uses the craft of a repeating line, "An egg is..."  The descriptions that follow are beautiful and of course, informative.  Such as, "An egg is colorful."  The content is conveyed through the carefully drawn illustrations with labels and captions.

*In "Palmetto: Symbol of Courage" by Kate Salley Palmer I noticed that she hand-lettered the pages and also did the illustrations so that it resembeled a graphic novel.  This book definitely appealed to me and I feel like it would appeal to students because it looks like a child did it/could do it. 

*In the "Stupid Crook Book", my boys love it because they read about true stories written through puns like "Deli's Do's and Don'ts."  It has tons of figurative language like onomatopoeia, similies, and metaphors.  Each short story is written in a different way.  One was written like a script.  Each story is written differently. 

*In the book, "Surprising Sharks," the author used a lot of similies to create interest.  the author gave us the facts through the captions and the engaging pictures.

*In the book, "A Good Day's Fishing" the text is simple, but usually with literary nonfiction texts, there are more sophisticated text features like a glossary or an index.  As writers, our students can be successful with this structure using the basic text and then can go back and add the more sophisticated structures and content.

One of the first grade teachers, Leslie Evatt, involved in our SWP partnership at Anderson Mill Elementary, found this wonderful ABC template that she shared with us.  We found this template to be very helpful in providing students a way to organize their words for their ABC books and in helping them make sure that all of their words went with the same topic.

Bonnie Cumbo's Literary Nonfiction Noticings

• captions may be included
• diagrams may be included
• historical literary nonfiction may follow a timeline
• cycles may be used ex. lifecycle of an egg, frog's life, butterflies life, etc.
• facts are written throughout the text
• the reader can learn through true information through their reading
• historical, real, or realistic characters or animals can be written about in the text
• dates can be included in the text 

by Kim Sutherland

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Lori Milan class noticings

Literary Nonfiction: Content Middle Ages

• facts included
• "there is something funny about the page"
• text not just in paragraph format
• captions to tell what the pictures are about
• characters are talking in talk bubbles
• the same character travels with you page to page as the narrator

April Camp's Literary Nonfiction Content-Specific Unit on Electricity

Below is our class noticings chart from Thomas Locker's Water Dance 

 This is the noticing chart that my class completed together in order to get some ideas of litereary non-fiction. They decided that they liked the way Thomas Locker wrote and wanted to included some figurative langauge in their writing by using alliterations and then also using and ABC format for the rest of the writing. They really did a great job including several different aspects of the mentor text that we read. You can see their samples below in the document.