Reading Nonfiction
Citation: Last name, First name. Title. City: Publisher, date.
Summary from online catalogue or verso:
Subject headings from online catalogue or verso:
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BEFORE READING THE BOOK:
- Check reliability.
- What are the author’s credentials?
- What are the publisher’s credentials?
- What is the copyright date and does it affect the reliability of the book?
- Access your background knowledge.
- Read the back cover and the dustcover of the book.
- Read the verso of the title page.
- What have you experienced in life that relates to this book?
- What have you read in books that relates to this book?
- Make predictions.
- What do you think you will learn in this book?
- How will this book help you better understand the world?
- How will this book help you better understand how to be a good human being?
READ THE BOOK
- Look at the vocabulary.
- What words are new to you?
- What words can you figure out by their their context? Give your definitions of these words.
- What words do you still not understand?
- Look at any illustrations and captions.
- What information can you learn from them?
- Are the illustrations essential to understanding the main idea or do they provide extra details or are they only for the sake of beauty?
- Look for the main ideas and details.
- For each chapter, take notes.
- Write down the main ideas.
- Give the evidence that supports those ideas.
- Decide what is most important.
- What is the most important idea in this book?
- What is the evidence for that idea?
- Why is that idea so important?
- Assess your strategies.
- On what pages did you slow down so you could better understand the writing?
- On what pages did you skim because you thought the information was not important?
- On what pages did you reread the information to help you understand?
- On what pages did you go back and hunt for facts that you wanted to write down?
 AFTER YOU READ
- Make connections.
- What have you experienced in life that relates to the information and ideas in this book?
- What have you heard about in life that relates to this book?
- What novels or nonfiction books have you read that relate to this book?
- Assess the value.
- What do you know about the world that you did not know before you read this book?
- What do you understand about life that you did not appreciate before you read this book?
- Mentally recite to remember.
- What do you think you should add to your general knowledge now that you have read the book?
- Create and memorize a 1-minute speech about what you have learned (ideas and evidence).
- Perform your speech for your teacher and classmates.