What I mean by informational text is books or articles about real life things, not stories. It can range from being about animals to regions to historical events and really anything else. This brings me to the question; should children read more informational text? I think so; I personally love having a bunch of knowledge. Watching the History and Discovery channels is very fun to me. I like to learn about things that I wouldn’t normally encounter in school and I did this when I was younger too. Do other kids enjoy this though?
Informational text can be utilized to teach kids about things that they may be interested in. Exposure is definitely the key to helping a student to develop their interest and possibly help them realize what they would like to do with their lives and informational text could be a form of this exposure. A problem with informational text though, is that it can be so dry that it won’t grab the attention of a young person. Should informational text be rewritten so it is more interesting to read or is there informational text out now that is very well written and will interest kids more? The reason I ask this is because any informational text I read when I was younger was always extremely boring and hard to concentrate on because of its lack of…well I don’t know what it was lacking, but it was definitely something.
I am in the same boat you are in that now that I am older I do enjoy informational texts and tv shows. I know though as a child I did not enjoy these things because they were so dry and just straight facts. I think there are many of these dry books that teachers still use and that are what turns kids off of reading this non-fiction informational stuff. What I do think is that there are more interesting informational books out there that are not being utilized in the classroom. In the joy of children’s literature book they discuss they book My season with Penguins. The information is accurate and organized for easy reading, the illustrations are interesting and help the reader understand the text, and the style of writing shows the author’s enthusiasm for the subject. Books like these would be highly beneficial for younger readers to begin their journey of discovering good informational texts. This would strike interest and hopefully lead to other texts like this in the future. This is important in the younger years especially because by third grade the standardized tests come in and informational texts are stressed even more.
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