Children\u27s Choices Through the Years: Some Surprising Results

It’s difficult to ignore all the recent teacher talk about the importance of helping our students become adept users of nonfiction texts. With this rising interest and attention being focused on nonfiction books, spurred by the adoption of Common Core Standards, we decided to look at the Children’s Choices finalists over the last ten years to determine if there was a connection to what children liked to read. We were especially curious about how many of the award winning books selected by children were actually nonfiction. Given our findings, we also decided to investigate further by analyzing all the publishers’ title submissions over the same ten years to determine the ratio of fiction to nonfiction titles. In this article, we begin by providing readers with an overview of IRA’s Children’s Choices Project and a review of studies focused on the use of nonfiction books in elementary school instruction and classroom libraries. We then will share with you what we consider to be very interesting and somewhat telling findings based on our investigation