Welcome to the Nonfiction Minute Archives.  This site is open to anyone who wants to learn about the world, with posts from award-winning nonfiction writers who love to share their interests and ideas with teachers and students and anyone else with curiosity.
To the right you can see a list of categories for the Minutes in the archive.  If you click on a category you're interested in, any posts that relate to that topic will show up.
There are likely to be changes in the home page coming along soon as we figure out how best to keep this valuable resource for teachers and curious folks easy to access and enjoy.

Dear loyal readers:

We have been amazed at the traffic on this site over the summer and particularly in the past week. It is heart-warming to see the growing popularity of the site. The Nonfiction Minute is clearly a valued resource.

We are making it better. On Saturday, September 9, we are launching the new Nonfiction Minute website. It will have the same url: www.nonfictionminute.org. It will be much easier to navigate and each post will have a link to a new page called Transfer to Teaching where our board member, Karen Sterling, Library Media Specialist at the Pennridge Middle School and K-12 District Library Coordinator, will be creating questions and activities for each post.

She is also redoing all the tags to make the Minutes more easily searched. As a result, the current archives are going to disappear as we rebuild each Minute for the new school year.

Most of the Minutes we republish on the new site will be our classic Minutes. But occasionally there will be a new Minute from a new member of iNK. And, of course, the Minutes on individuals, our biography Minutes, are now available in a print book, which you can preorder. (Click on the book to learn more)

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We were hoping to be able to publish a new year’s worth of Minutes but that will require funding. If you would like to help us out, we have a crowd-sourcing fundraiser currently going on. We are applying for grants this year. Let’s see how the new and exciting year develops. In the meantime get ready for our brand new Nonfiction Minute website.

This week School Library Journal published "Beyond Reading: Choosing Nonfiction for the Developing Reader" by Mary Ann Scheuer and Alyson Beecher.  It was circulated among the iNK authors who use this website to introduce children to the many voices and interests of people who write un-leveled reading for them.  We thought you might be interested in the reaction to that piece from one of our extremely articulate authors Jan Adkins:  

Many thanks to Roxie Munro for calling attention to the School Library Journal article on nonfiction. I found it . . . bloodless.
 
The moan of the dinosaur sounds from the swamp: Enough already. 
 
I understand academic's desire for metrics, and librarians' desire for "standards" with which to measure their performance in bringing the just-right books to individual readers. But these external measurements of appropriate level can become autocratic, paralleling an increasingly authoritarian state. And in my heart I am certain that well-meaning metricians suppress the one vital factor we celebrate: style. I am also certain that the grid of just-right levels is a divisive fence that separates readers from books that would expand their understanding and challenge their syntactic muscles. These "common" feedlot fences offer books of encouraging simplicity to young readers but discourage them from many of the beguiling, genre-warping, uniquely voiced classic books that compelled many of us to become authors for young readers. 
 
I've been reading Paddle to the Sea to my grandchildren. My 8 and 10 year-old grandsons are keenly waiting to see how Sherlock Holmes solves his "Study in Scarlet." We are ramping up to read Treasure Island. None of these are in their just-right boxes. The books they bring from their school libraries are marvels of appropriate clarity and never challenge their reading levels. I want to challenge them and sharpen their wits on tough intellectual fiber. Most of all, I want them to appreciate the humanness of the author's idiosyncratic voice, the style of storytelling that shapes words and phrases, metaphors and similes, and evades metrical boxes. Filters of vocabulary and syntax are not neutral; they strain out the herbs in a recipe. The stories my boyos love most lately are "The Day the Dam Broke," "The Night the Ghost Got In," and "The Night the Bed Fell." James Thurber's droll phrasing and pace sends them into screeches of piratical schadenfreude. Yes, the metrics are all wrong for their separate reading levels.

​ Excuse me, dear librarians. I love all of you and understand your desire to excel in encouraging children to read more and more and to gobble up the entire store of words, pictures, and wisdom in your stacks. You do marvelous, heroic work! But style is immeasurable, and pigeonholing books by "appropriate" levels will inevitably separate young and creative minds from their uniquely voiced nourishment. It's even possible that placing books in orderly boxes of access is a kind of slow, flameless burning.
Adkins

 

Ink Think Tank is pleased to announce the resumption of the popular free Nonfiction Minute on Monday, September 11, to continue every day (Monday - Friday) throughout the 2017-18 school year. Every Saturday the next week's five minutes will be posted on the site (each: a 400-word text on an intriguing nonfiction topic, author audio reading, and visuals). Content will include many of our classic nonfiction minutes, along with fresh new material created by our award-winning authors.

Please come here  and enjoy every Minute!

We are also excited to let you know that Nonfiction Minutes are being published in an illustrated print collection series published by Seagrass, a division of Quarto (Jean Reynolds, editor). The first book is called "Thirty People Who Changed the World" and will be available on October 10, although you can order it now...check it out! ​

​The next book of 30 Minutes - fascinating bite-sized essays with images - will be about animals.


​Thanks!
The iNk Think Tank Team

.We are resuming publication for the 2017-2018 school year.  

iNK’s award-winning nonfiction authors post 400-word daily essays for kids that can be read in 60 seconds more or less. Each school day The Nonfiction Minute blog features a diverse array of engaging content. The Minutes provide one-of-a-kind connections between nonfiction writing and reading and the latest Common Core Standards for literacy, STEM, and historical curricular content.

Textbook content and writing is boring, and for kids, that kind of reading feels like a chore. Feedback on The Nonfiction Minute resoundingly tells us that students are captivated by the content and often can’t wait to go home and share what they discovered in their daily reading. They also can’t wait to see what’s coming the following day.

The Nonfiction Minutes are geared for upper elementary and middle school students and free for all classrooms. It’s as simple coming to the website to see what's featured for that day We include an MP3 audio file featuring the author reading his or her Minute. So the fascinating content is available to all. Minutes also include original artwork, photography, videos, and primary source material where appropriate. See for yourself why we've had more than 2 million page views since we launched:

How to Extinguish a Fire with a Bag of Potato Chips by moi.
The Mystery of the Blue Marble by Alexandra Siy
How the Composer Handel Used His Music to Help British Orphans by Andrea Warren
Lemuel's Bridge by Roxie Munro
  Feel free to browse the archives. Be warned: these Nonfiction Minutes are habit forming. In total, we wrote 180 Minutes, one for each school day.  We value our 225,000 visitors and each visitor could be a classroom of kids.
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Discover for yourself why we’ve heard from teachers who use The Minutes that they are now dedicated to and enthused over The Nonfiction Minute. They have told us what we already knew, that children need access to interesting and compelling nonfiction in order to grapple with the complex and subtle real world. They’ve told us that our little nutshells of facts are ‘irresistible curiosity accelerators.’ As authors of award-winning nonfiction, each Minute is our way to share our fascination with the world with the best audience—young students. We invite you as teachers and/or parents to take advantage of The Nonfiction Minute this coming school year.

And if you want to contribute to our Give them reading that gets them talking crowd-funding campaign, you can find it here:
 

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