Gearing up for the Blogging A to Z Challenge

April is going to be a busy month here on Literacious! I’ll be posting my regular content each week with storytime themed lesson plans, book lists, and more, but I’ll also be participating in my 10th year of the Blogging A to Z Challenge! If you’re unfamiliar with this blogging challenge, each day of the month (Monday-Saturday) is assigned a letter of the alphabet and participants can choose a theme to work around.

This year’s my theme is Fact Finders Club: Nonfiction for Curious Kids. I’m going to be choosing a different topic for each letter of the alphabet and providing 12 nonfiction titles for kids and teens. I’m so excited to share nonfiction books (312 books to be exact!) for the whole month of April. When I was growing up, nonfiction books for kids were dry, full of text, with limited illustrations and just not really fun. Nonfiction books for kids are having a heyday right now and it’s so exciting to see.

Kids’ nonfiction books are engaging and fun to read with smaller text blocks, with bright colors, charts, graphs, illustrations, and full-color photographs. Melissa Stewart, a nonfiction author, proposed five different categories of nonfiction books for kids in 2017 and since then more and more people are using these categories to create nonfiction and market it for kids. So before we jump into this year’s 2025 Blogging A to Z Challenge, let’s go over these five categories that you’ll be seeing over the next few weeks.

Active

These are highly interactive titles that are often how-to books – science experiments, cookbooks, activity books that kids learn by doing.

Browseable

Browseable nonfiction can be read cover to cover or by jumping around to points of interest and are eye-catching in design with often brightly illustrated pages that pull readers in and have short blocks of text that are easy to digest.

Traditional

Traditional nonfiction titles are made as an overview of a topic and are often part of a larger series. These texts have a clear, straightforward way of sharing information and can be written at a variety of age and developmental levels.

Expository Literature

Compared to traditional texts, expository literature focuses on specialized topics in an expository style to explain the topic through a strong voice. And while, expository literature may not sound the most interesting, it plays a vital role in teaching kids and actually can be quite engaging in their passion to share information.

Narrative

Narrative nonfiction is one of my favorite formats because it feels very much like storytelling rather than fact-based learning, (but don’t be alarmed, there is plenty of learning going on!). These types of nonfiction books work well for sharing about historical events and for biographies and include real people, settings, and events.

Please stop back regularly throughout the month of April to see all the amazing nonfiction titles I plan to share from all five of these categories!