Read to Me! (Part 4): Ten Great Non-fiction Books to Read Aloud

I'm a passionate believer in reading aloud to children. It's a regular part of every day for us in Year 6 and I'm more and more convinced that this routine joy for us all is the key to building readers for life, in terms of confidence, knowledge, skills, and of course, pleasure.

Those who read aloud to their classes will undoubtedly read primarily fiction - novels, short stories, poems. Children enjoy listening and talking about these very much and I have also been struck by how they seem to enjoy writing stories for themselves above all other kinds of text. In fact, it was this 'noticing' that led me to explore the idea of reading more non-fiction to my class this year: would they enjoy it as much as getting into a good novel? Would their enjoyment of writing information texts for pleasure be enhanced too? Would the Book Chat be any different to that when discussing fiction or poetry? 

I have in the past always read non-fiction books to my classes  but I have never read whole books  of this kind to the children - why, I really don't know. There is so much high quality non-fiction out there at the moment that it seems silly not to do so! So this half term, I have experimented with reading aloud much more regularly from the same non-fiction book, purely for pleasure, just like a class novel. It hasn't been non-fiction every day; in fact, I have asked the class from time to time to vote if they would like to hear from our fiction or non-fiction read. It varies, as with all our reading habits.

Whilst I am still researching the effect of the practice - and I aim to publish this on the Open University Reading For Pleasure website later this academic year - I hope the following list of books that read aloud extremely well will be of use to anyone looking to explore the richness of non-fiction-reading-for-pleasure for themselves. I would love to hear of how your class responds! 

***

The Ten Books

1. Dr Nick Crumpton and Gavin Scott: Everything you know about Dinosaurs is wrong

A marvellously 'dippable' book, each double page spread debunks a myth that children (and many adults, including myself) may have previously believed to be true: Dinosaurs could roar: WRONG! Dinosaurs were all big: WRONG! Dinosaurs are all extinct: WRONG! Excited book chat is an understatement for this one! 

2. Alexis Frederick-Frost : Maker Comics: Grow a Garden!

I discovered this lovely series whilst looking for graphic novels for my class to read. We actually read this one with the children reading aloud each character's part to each other, rather like a play. So many children wanted to join in. The fun, quirky narrative (genius naked mole-rat characters anyone?!) helps to soften the very challenging information about the science of plant growth forming the main intent of the text. Others in the series include Baking and Fixing Cars...but these are just as challenging so be aware! 

3. Helaine Becker and Dow Phumiruk: Counting on Katherine

The Hidden Figures of the Space Race are at last getting their justified recognition and this book, winner of the Information category of the UKLA award in 2020 is a beautifully illustrated and super-clear non-fiction narrative of Katherine's life. The illustrations repay very close attention - there's lots of 'hidden' mathematical references - so once it has been read aloud, I'm sure many children will want to go on to explore the book much more closely. 

4. Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson: The Undefeated

This extraordinary book was the winner of the Information Book category of the UKLA prize last year. It is an inspiring and intensely thought-provoking text, equally challenging in its words and in its pictures, and has been the starting point of some of the deepest and most sensitive and questioning discussion I have ever experienced with my Year 6s. The poet reads the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cHIWtl8PNk, a clip I will always show every one of my classes. 

5. Susan Martineau and Vicky Barker: Real Life Mysteries

A bit like a modern-day Mysteries of the Unknown (see No. 6 below), this book riffs on many children's fascination with the esoteric: the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, spontaneous combustion...and more. The tales are so bizarre that any reading is always accompanied by exclamations of 'No way!'. The structure of the book is perfect with two double-page spreads for each 'mystery': one, an introduction to the mystery itself and its attendant tales, and the second an exploration of two sides arguing whether each phenomenon is fact or fiction. A great book to pick up again and again, it won the Blue Peter Award for Best Book With Facts. 

6. Carey Miller: Monsters

My very first full blog was about the effect that the Usborne classic 'Ghosts' had on me as a boy. There is something universally fascinating and inspiring about this series, thankfully re-released by Usborne. Now all three are back in print and this, the third in the series, focuses on the monstrous, from the Loch Ness Monster and T-Rex to Medusa and the Yeti. The illustrations are pretty horrific and mostly gory, so of course this automatically makes it a winner with most older children! 

7. Ned Hartley and Binny Talib: The Big Book of Dead Things

What a title! This information book that covers everything from mummies to dinosaurs presents one of the most fascinating concepts to children: death. In no way morbid, it offers a lively and pacy exploration of all things dead and extinct by way of a fox family exploring a museum. There are overtones of graphic novel style here that definitely rewards closer viewing, but the text is engaging on a whole class level and the book is exactly what the title says - BIG! - which makes viewing the pictures easy and pleasurable. 

8. Michael Hearst and Jelmer Noordeman: Unusual Creatures

This book that was sitting in my class bookshelves was one that was requested by one of my class to be read aloud to everyone: their amazement at the peculiarities of the beasts described between the covers simply had to be shared. Each page describes a different 'unusual creature' from around the world and the information is couched in quirky structural and linguistic choices: there's True or False quizzes (which engaged everyone!), but also a True or True quiz, for example! I am fairly hardy but the hagfish page, read just after lunch, certainly gave my stomach a bit of a turn. Maybe best read at a different time of day...

9.Christine Dorion and Gosia Herba: Invented by Animals

Like Unusual Creatures, this book has fascinated the children I have taught. An original concept for a book on animals, it explores the concept of biomimicry, specifically how humans are looking to animals and their incredible construction, disguise and communication methods (amongst many other things!) to inspire our own technologies. The page about the mimic octopus led to requests to actually see the creature via a video clip and I particularly love how this book acts as a vehicle for natural further exploration and developed learning. 

10. Markus Motum: Curiosity

The reader-aloud becomes the voice of the Mars Rover, Curiosity, in this complex but beautifully clear picture book aimed at KS2. Throughout, there is a driving sense of wonder and potential making this is the perfect book to inspire the next generation of space explorers, scientists and programmers. 

***

With thanks to Nosy Crow, bsmall publishing and Anna Howarth of Usborne books for their help in preparing this blog. 

'The Dark and the Light': An Interview with Richard Lambert

When I read Richard Lambert's The Wolf Road in Autumn 2020, I knew that it was hands-down one of the best books I would have read that year. Particular scenes and characterisation are still remembered with clarity; the way in which animals formed a huge part of the novel and the way in which the author portrayed their uniquely separate world was equally striking.

Now Lambert has a new book out - Shadow Town - and to celebrate its publication, I am delighted to have been able to ask the author a few questions about his writing and the part that poetry plays in his writing life. 

***

Your new book is for a slightly younger audience than The Wolf Road. Why did you decide to write for this age group and was it easier or harder to accomplish?

The age group for the book came from the main character, Toby. I started with Toby – unexpectedly. I was on a train journey and without thinking started writing a scene – about a boy and his dad. This became the scene where Toby says goodbye to his dad that’s in the novel. Toby is a thirteen-year-old boy who tries hard socially but who is constantly getting things wrong and misunderstanding things. I think one of the places he came from was going into schools to do creative-writing workshops and noticing children who misunderstood things or whom the rest of the class group find annoying. And I remembered being like that myself when I was a child. Also I wanted to write an adventure story for children – because I loved those kinds of story myself when I was young.

What is most important to you in portraying young people in your stories?

I feel I have far less knowledge of young people than schoolteachers or parents, so I am constantly questioning myself and whether I’m getting the young characters right. Two things are important for me, though. One is that I don’t underestimate the children’s intelligence – both my characters’ and readers’ intelligence. And the other is that I don’t write a bleak, unhopeful story. I still feel scarred by some of the books we were made to read at school when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen. So I worry that my stories are too dark, and I hope the dark and scary aspects are redeemed by lightness, life and hope, which I try to have in the stories. I want my stories to reflect life, both the dark and the light.

What is the difference for you between writing prose (especially for children) and writing poetry?

I write poems on impulse – so I don’t plan them, and they usually come out short, and usually they are quite personal. But with stories, I plan them beforehand. I visualise scenes in my head before I write. So I can see the place and the people, dimly, like in a dream. And I plot out the stories carefully. When it comes to the writing of prose, the sound of the language is important, and telling the story. When it’s going well, there’s a real flow to it.

The sentences are really important to me, too. With my first published novel, The Wolf Road, the sentences were much shorter, almost staccato at times. They felt to me quite plain. That had a strong effect but I felt that was a lot to do with my writing ability – I wasn’t capable of writing longer sentences. So I spent quite a lot of time after that trying to write longer sentences, and seeing how other writers did that. I wanted something larger, and sentences over which I had more control. I somehow felt I could include more of the world if I could enlarge my technique. And I’ve begun thinking of paragraphs and sentences like little poems in themselves, so I want them to have a shape, and to be interesting on their own terms.

Who are your favourite poets and how do they influence your writing?

I have lots of favourite poets, and they change. But I love John Clare, the nineteenth-century farm labourer, and his nature poems. I love the poems of the Irish poet Michael Longely, for their gentleness. Also the modernist poet Lorine Niedecker, who grew up and lived in a tiny town in Wisconsin in the middle of the last century and worked as a cleaner in the local hospital. The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who wrote warm, witty, and wise conversational poems. All very different.

The sound of words is important to me. When I read, the sound of the language really affects me. Even if I’m reading silently, I’m still sort-of forming the words into speech in my head. And that’s the same for prose as poetry. So I’ll often read a writer if I like the sound of their language. But I think that love of sound in language has been increased by my reading of poetry. And that informs my writing. Also the need for concision. Editing a poem, I'll think for ages about losing a tiny word like 'the' or inserting or removing a comma. So that affects my prose, too. And when reading a poem, it's often the visual image that hits me, so I've become attuned to the importance of the image. The sensory detail.

New readers coming to your writing will find it vivid and starkly memorable: are you a writer more interested in the visual or the aural impact on the reader?

Well, both are really important for me, I think. The sound of words is vital, but I think visually a lot too – I see all the scenes I write. When I'm planning, it's like I am running a film constantly, then adjusting some part of the film – dialogue, actors, lighting, costume – and reshooting the scene.   
But I have thought about this question sometimes myself, what is it that I’m most interested in, and I’ve often thought what I’m less excited by as a writer and reader are concepts, ideas and thoughts. I just feel I have less capacity for that than other people do. And that what excites me is the aural and the visual. That’s enough for me. 

What energises you as a writer and what exhausts you?

I think the thing that energises me also exhausts me – it’s the imagined story and the world I’m creating. It feels like physical effort. Perhaps like a game, or doing some physical activity like playing football. There’s a surge of physical energy, and I follow that in my flow of writing, then I am pretty tired afterwards. Editing is slightly different, it’s just slow, plodding work, and slightly more intellectual, cutting, deciding if something works or not. I’ve got slightly better at not despairing if something isn’t working. I can more easily cut a sentence or paragraph, a scene, or even a whole chapter. But overall it feels physically and emotionally tiring. Like everyone’s work, I imagine, is demanding.

What do you hope young readers remember from your work?

Enjoyment and fun. A visceral thrill. 

***

Shadow Town by Richard Lambert was published by Everything with Words on Thursday 21st October. 

With many thanks to Richard Lambert for answering my questions and to Fritha Lindqvist for her help in preparing this blog. 

Writing History: An interview with Frankie Durkin

The Histronauts: A Greek Adventure by Frances Durkin and Vicky Barker (b small, 2021)

With The Histronauts now into their fourth outing, A Greek Adventure, it's starting to look like a series that is very much going places. When the first three books (Roman, Egyptian and Viking) were published, I was very excited to see historical fact not only presented in an authentic and passionately personal way, but that it was all couched in the form of a graphic novel! Alongside this, there was diversity in evidence too and a very practical, hands-on feel (there's always recipes or crafts to make), all of which combine to give the series a refreshing and exciting edge over many other history books for children.

These books are a real gift to teachers, but what has really fascinated me as a Writing Teacher is how do we education professionals best help the young people in our care to think, read and write well about history? So it's been a huge pleasure  to have been given the opportunity to ask Frankie Durkin about her feeling for the past and how she writes history. 

***

Hi Frankie. I’m interested to know more about how history became such a passion for you. Can you tell us what was the first time you knew history was going to become a big part of your life? 

Hi Ben. I really don’t remember a moment when history wasn’t in my life. It was always firmly in the foundations of my childhood thanks to my parents and aunt. From day trips to museum outings to books to documentaries and TV shows. There was always so much history on my doorstep and kids in the UK are so lucky to grow up in a place where the past is such a key part of the landscape and tourist industry. There are places to visit and stories to learn wherever you are. The smell of the Jorvik Viking Centre is really nostalgic for me and the research visits for The Histronauts’ Viking book a few years ago brought back a lot of happy childhood memories. I also became fascinated with ancient Greece after spending an afternoon watching Clash of the Titans when I was about eight and I read everything I could get my hands on, even Homer. And I remember Mum having a book that tied in with a mock trial of Richard III that was staged by Channel 4 back in the early eighties. That led to another obsession and I actually wrote to my MP about exhuming the bones of the Princes in the Tower from Westminster Abbey. But I don’t remember ever having a moment when I thought that I would become a historian. I didn’t even study it formally until I started my master’s degree. But I love it. I love asking questions and finding out about the lives of people who lived such a long time ago. It felt like a natural progression to do my PhD and keep doing something that I’m so passionate about. But I never dreamed I could be lucky enough to be sharing history with young audiences quite like this.

2. Which historical periods have particularly fascinated you personally? What is it about them that grabbed them so much? 

So ancient Greece and The Wars of the Roses were very big early influences, but the Middle Ages has been my longest fascination. I grew up close to medieval castles and cathedrals so they definitely shaped what I was most interested in. I also like to blame Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But those familiar old buildings and city streets always inspired me to look for answers about the history and what life was like for the real people who built them and lived in them. And that’s what carried me into my doctoral research and the reason I became a medievalist.

3. In choosing to write for young people, what did/do you want to capture to engage them in a similar fascination in history to your own. 

My own love of history started, and was nurtured, when I was very young. I don’t really recall it being something that I thought of as a chore or even a subject to learn. It was just something I was very interested in and always wanted to find out more about. My parents gave me the freedom to explore what I wanted to, and I loved finding out new things. But I’m not unique in that respect; so many historians talk about a childhood love of the subject or a particular topic that captured their imaginations and stayed with them through to adulthood. I think it’s natural to want to be a part of igniting that spark for new generations and I really want to help create those lifelong passions for history in our readers.

The Histronauts themselves are the most important element for engaging our readers. We created a group of friends who want to explore and ask questions. They love to go on adventures and they definitely want you to come with them. They don’t just want to be told what the past was like, they want to discover it for themselves. We really want everyone to be a part of their gang and to learn alongside them. 

4. What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of writing about history? 

Oh, that’s easy; what to leave out. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing a book for children or a research paper for a room full of medievalists, there is always more to say than I ever have time or space to include. Making the decisions about what makes the final edit and what doesn’t is so difficult. I honestly can’t imagine that any non-fiction author doesn’t have the same problem. When it comes to writing The Histronauts that decision is sometimes helped by the fact that some things are just not appropriate for a young audience. But a lot of research goes into these books and so many wonderful facts or stories don’t make it into the final edit. I am lucky that some details can be used in workshops or teacher notes that support the books but, ultimately, I hope that The Histronauts inspire our readers to find out more for themselves and that they are a steppingstone into whole new worlds of all the things that didn’t make it into the books.

5. I’ve found when children write about history it’s important to show them to take a specific focus. How do you select what to include/write about when presenting huge topics such as “The Greeks” or “The Romans”?

That’s a great question! The structure of the books set out a lot of parameters for what I decide to focus on. The Histronauts spend a single day with a person from a certain period so choosing the point in time that they will experience helps to give the books their focus. Some of our books look at subject areas that refer to thousands of years of history and I take care to pick a point that gives us a wealth of information and allows us to discuss what had happened earlier. A good example of this is from our book about ancient Egypt. I wanted to set it during the construction of the pyramids but this happened relatively early in the timeline of what we call ‘ancient Egypt’ so it limited what our characters could talk to each other about. However, by shifting the setting to the Valley of the Kings in a later period we could still acknowledge the pyramids and take advantage of the stunning archaeology from Deir el-Medina where the craftspeople who built the tombs lived and worked.

The individuals who serve as The Histronauts guide also gives us an anchor to work around. In previous books we have met the daughter of a Viking boat builder, an Egyptian priestess and a man enslaved by a Roman General. In A Greek Adventure we meet a theatre propmaker who introduces us to his work, his family, the things he sees and even the things he eats. We wanted to make a deliberate shift away from experiencing the world through the eyes of kings and queens. Instead, our key characters are ‘ordinary’ people who give us an insight into how any one of us might have lived during that period. So, although the book does contain broad information about different classes of society, we want to show people that our readers can relate to and imagine themselves interacting with.

Our intention is always to take a vast topic and focus on how a person occupied their own place at a point in that time. We then build around them and allow The Histronauts tell us more about the bigger parts of that world. 

6. In your opinion what does the format of The Histronauts series do for children’s love of history AND love of reading for pleasure? 

Graphic novels are such an exciting format and I’m so delighted to see so much discussion about them between creators and educators on social media (I know you’re a big part of this discourse Ben). Visual literacy is such an important skill for all book lovers to develop, no matter their age or reading levels. And I really hope that readers who aren’t always confident with pages full of text feel that our books are a welcoming place for them to have fun learning about the past.

I’m so in awe of the visual elements of these books and it is such a privilege to be a part of the team that makes them. The brilliant illustrations are done by The Histronauts’ co-creator, Grace Cooke, and the layout is designed by b small publishing’s fantastic Art Director, Vicky Barker. We use images to communicate a lot of historical information that I could not include in the text. The visual details are always the very first starting point for our research and Grace and I always begin with museum trips so that we can see the tangible elements of the worlds we want to explore. We find so many things that we want to incorporate and it’s amazing to be able to create such an inviting version of history that appeals to all kinds of readers. We’re also able to use images as a method of telling the story and developing our characters; we love sneaking little jokes or details in that you might not see on your first read through. It’s a wonderful medium to use and gives us so many layers for our readers to engage with.

7. Inclusion and diversity is vital in today’s books. How do you address this hugely important topic in writing about history for young people? 

It’s enormously important and there are lots of ways that we try to make our versions of history more inclusive. As I mentioned earlier, it’s important to me that we don’t limit our account of the past to one of the ruling classes. I think it’s really reductive to perceive the past only through the eyes of the wealthiest people who lived then, so we want to challenge that. We also always want to counter perceptions of what people in a certain time and place might have looked like. We want to show that people of colour lived in ancient Greece and were a part of the Roman Empire, it’s important to see that Vikings were not all blonde-haired and blue-eyed. The past was an enormously diverse place so we are determined to represent that and give our readers something to talk about.

8. Having known very little about the history of ancient Baghdad myself when I first came to teach it to my Year 6 class, I was so excited to learn along with them! Which historical periods would you love to see become more of a focus in schools, primary and secondary? 

Oh, there are so many! Personally, I would love to explore more about African history; I’m reading a great book about the Benin Kingdom right now and it’s making me very conscious of the scale of that gap in my knowledge. It’s exciting to start to remedy that! But as well as widening the global span of what we study, I’m also passionate about teaching different aspects of what we already learn. British history has been too narrow for too long and we are a nation full of cultures whose history deserves to be celebrated. There are so many diverse writers and historians who are now writing histories that have been hidden away and it’s really exciting to see the growth of important narratives that have been neglected for so long. Organisations like The Black Curriculum and The National Trust are doing amazing work to expand the way we look at the past so we should embrace their work and welcome them into our classrooms. 

9. And finally as a passionate historian and educator, a big question - what is the point of learning about history for young people?

A massive question! How long do we have?! I could give you so many reasons that are about studying the past to understand the present or seeing the political patterns that shape our society. But if I really have to sum up why I think young people should study history I would pick two areas that are most important to me: critical thinking and empathy. As a historian it’s so important to learn how to think critically and to assess the evidence that you work with. It’s crucial that children learn to question everything and history encourages them to do exactly that. And I want them to feel empathy for people who lived long ago. Whether they’re studying war, or royalty, or industry, or any aspect of history, I really want them to think about the human aspect of it. I want them to want to understand that history isn’t just dates or statistics, it’s real people, just like them, who lived and loved and struggled laughed and learned. Whether it’s their great-grandparents’ experience of migration or a local story about the coal mines or a stately home they visited on a school trip, everything that can be labelled ‘history’ has an important human story. It’s why I’m a historian.

'A most awful, hideous place'

Maggie Blue and the Dark World by Anna Goodall (Guppy Books, 2021)

This new adventure story - the first in what will hopefully turn into a series - is quite unlike anything I have read before. An original take on the 'portal story', with much literary allusion and some vivid and engaging characterisation, this is a challenging and rewarding read especially well-suited to those young (and old!) readers who have read Narnia, Harry Potter and His Dark Materials and whose reading diet has taken in a few children's classics along the way, too.

Maggie Blue is an unhappy girl living with her eccentric aunt Esme. Neither school nor home offer her enough in the way of comfort, from having to contend with the bullying Ida and unsympathetic teachers during the day to dealing with the lack of central heating and a comfortable bed at night. But there is something about Maggie. Dot, one of Esme's musical friends, senses a difference in the girl while that difference seems to set her as an ideal target in Ida's eyes. It is when Ida disappears and Maggie discovers strange things happening in the woods that the story then takes an eccentric path.

Perhaps intentionally, the threads of the story start to unravel here and the novel takes turns that for me were genuinely unexpected. Some will feel the presence and madness of 'Wonderland' in Goodall's 'Dark World' ('a most awful, hideous place' as one character calls it), though it is an even more violent and disturbing version of Carroll's already nightmarish land. But because of its richly woven tapestry of allusions, I am sure each reader will find their own connections to past reading.

For me, though, the strongest parallels were with Mozart's and Schikaneder's fairy tale, The Magic Flute. (Is the eponymous character's name a garbled echo of that opera's English title even?) Once Maggie enters The Dark World, scenes evolve - as in Flute - in a kind of weird, improvisatory, devil-may-care way but with a solid internal logic all of their own (The latter point, for me, most emphatically sets Maggie Blue in contrast to the knowing, self-conscious illogicality of Carroll's book.) Further potential connections are also intriguing to consider: the bird-catcher, 'everyman' figure is perhaps taken by a particularly wonderful one-eyed cat called Hoagie who, despite his completely self-centred attitude, is one of the most lovable characters I have met in literature of recent years; Day and Night, Light and Darkness are tangibly to the fore replete with Moon-witches and a 'Sun-god/magician', whose designs on Enlightenment become a key plot point; while also haunting the narrative is a spectacularly dazzling but terrifying creature, bent on evil - a transformed Queen of the Night. I shall not say too much about Maggie's parents here, but their almost-absence throughout (which perhaps may become more of a part of the future sequels) felt like a nod to the challenging tensions between parent(s) and child in The Magic Flute.

As every performance of Mozart's masterpiece will reveal infinite wonders and unseen connections and contradictions, I felt strongly that re-readings of Maggie Blue would uncover many things new. This novel is a truly original piece of work and very much recommended to intelligent, thinking readers of 11+. I, for one, cannot wait for the sequel.

With thanks to Guppy Books who sent me the new paperback edition of Maggie Blue - it was so good, I have put it in the class library...and bought myself the hardback!