How to teach your kid to read nonfiction and find facts

"How far away is the moon?" "Why do cats purr?" "Who invented pizza?" Kids ask a hundred questions a day. Nonfiction reading is how they learn to find the answers themselves, and it uses different skills than reading stories.

Why nonfiction is its own skill

A story goes from beginning to end. A nonfiction book or article is organized differently: headings, captions, diagrams, a table of contents, an index. You often don't read it front to back; you jump to the part you need.

The U.S. Institute of Education Sciences' guide on reading comprehension recommends teaching children to use a text's organizational structure to understand, learn and remember it, including the common structures of informational texts. It also recommends using multiple genres and texts rich in ideas and information.

The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees that all reading is good reading: fiction, biographies, magazines and comics all count.

Skill 1: Read an article and share three facts

1. Pick an article about something you like. Kids' science and nature magazines, library nonfiction and kids' news sites all work.
2. Read it all the way through.
3. Write three facts you learned.
4. Share them with your family, maybe at dinner.

Tips:

• Preview first. Before reading, look at the title, headings, pictures and captions. "What do you think this is about?" Predicting gets the brain ready.
• "Fact" means something you could check, like "Octopuses have three hearts," not "Octopuses are cool."
• Put facts in your own words. Copying sentences isn't the same as understanding them.

Skill 2: Use a table of contents or an index

These are the search engines of the book world.

1. Pick something to look up: "What do sharks eat?"
2. Check the table of contents (at the front, listing chapters) or the index (at the back, listing topics in ABC order).
3. Find the page number.
4. Turn there and read about it.

Teach the difference: the table of contents shows the big sections, in order. The index lists specific topics, alphabetically, with every page they appear on. For "sharks' teeth," the index is faster.

Make it a race: "Find out how long an elephant's trunk is. Go!"

Skill 3: Answer a family question with a trusted source

This is the mastery goal, and it adds a big new idea: checking your answer.

1. Ask your family for a question. Real curiosity is best.
2. Look it up in a book or a site your grown-up trusts.
3. Check the answer in a second place.
4. Share the answer, and where you found it.

Why check a second place? In a well-known Stanford study, researchers watched professional fact checkers, historians and Stanford students judge websites. The fact checkers did best, and one of their habits stood out: rather than staying on one page, they opened other sites in new tabs to compare and get context. Checking a second source is a kid-sized version of the same habit.

"Where did you find it?" Saying the source out loud is a great habit. It's the beginning of citing sources, and it makes kids notice whether a source is a book, an encyclopedia, a museum website or a random video.

Online, a grown-up helps. Choose trusted sites together, like library databases, museum and science-center sites, or encyclopedias written for kids. (More on judging sources in spotting ads and checking sources.)

Feed the curiosity

• Keep a question jar. Write down questions as they come up, and pick one to research on the weekend.
• Visit the library's nonfiction section. The AAP suggests getting a library card.
• Follow the interest. A kid obsessed with volcanoes will read harder nonfiction about volcanoes than they would about anything else.

Make it a quest

In Family Quests, this is the Fact Finder skill. Practice quests are read a nonfiction article and share three facts and use a table of contents or index to find something, and the mastery quest is answer a family question by looking it up in a book or trusted site, with a grown-up helping choose the source. Start free.

Next: teach your kid to spot ads and check sources, or go back to chapter books.