- We read fiction and we read non-fiction, often together.
I'll be reading perhaps a novel about World War II
and I'll raise the question
what was World War II actually like,
so I run off to buy an Atkinson account
of what went on.
It seems to me that the way these two books
might be used together might be to teach
the student about the responsibility that he has
when it comes to a text.
He has a responsibility when he enters non-fiction
to raise some questions about the vision
he's being offered.
He has that too with fiction,
but if you get lost in the story, that's okay.
I would think that the first step
in teaching these books together
would be to teach the students something about
his stance and his responsibilities.
Obviously that leads into the signposts,
the fiction signposts.
Your responsibility when you're reading fiction
is to yourself, to be an observer,
to watch what's going on,
to try and make sense of it,
to try to understand
how characters are evolving and changing,
to try to understand the conflicts
that arise and why they arise,
and whose side you might be on.
The responsibility that you face
when you deal with non-fiction
might be to assess
the quoted words.
Why has this man been quoted?
Why has that man been quoted?
What perceptions, what perspectives rather,
do they each offer?
And how do I judge between them
or weigh them in the balance?
I don't know, I think it begins with stance.
Begins with stance.
- Well, Bob often says that we need
for kids to be both responsive
and responsible readers.
And I think that that was probably in our minds
as we wrote both books.
They rolled out at two different time periods
because we thought it would probably be,
gosh, I don't want to say easiest,
but that's the word that comes to mind,
easiest for teachers
to connect kids to the notion of signposts
with literary texts.
Then after students have begun
to be that more
alert reader,
someone who has learned how to
look for the moves an author makes in the text,
then we can take them into the non-fiction.
So for teachers out there who have read
Notice and Note, they'll pick up reading non-fiction
and just add to that repertoire of signposts.
You know, look here, kids, when we read non-fiction
we can be looking for these things.
For folks who have not yet read Notice and Note,
then if you teach literary texts,
we would encourage that as soon as you
finish reading Reading Non-Fiction,
that you'll pick up Notice and Note
and say alright, how can I just
fold back in these literary signposts
to help kids at the same time?