Genre Madness

One of the best things about reading the Newbery list is that the Newbery committee has been good about selecting children's literature from a wide variety of genres.  Recently, I decided to go through my books on Goodreads and try to re-categorize them by genre.  This is more difficult than it sounds because sometimes there are some books that ride the lines between genres.  I also chose to include some subgenres which made the task even more complicated

Strictly speaking, literature comes in two broad categories:

1. Nonfiction - Writing that is not made up
2. Fiction - Writing that is made up

I prefer to break literature into three broad categories:

1. Nonfiction - Writing that is not made up
2. Realistic fiction - Writing that is made up but could actually happen.  This can be contemporary or historical.
3. Fantasy fiction - Writing that is made up and could not happen (or has not happened yet in the case of science fiction)

I think this is a good way to divide literature because distinguishing fact from fiction is often difficult for young children.  I remember student teaching and we were looking at Alexander and the Wind Up Mouse.  There was a worksheet that had the students identify if parts of the book could have actually happened or not and the students really struggled with it.  One of the kindergarten teachers that I observed always had her students determine fiction or nonfiction for each book that was read in class.  I think it would also be beneficial to have students judge a fiction book after reading it to determine if it is realistic or fantasy.