Four months today sees the start of this year’s FCBG-led annual celebration of non-fiction for children and young people and we are delighted to now reveal the resources we’ve created to encourage and facilitate your participation.
For 2016 we’re encouraging bookgroups to create their own non-fiction books. You might decide to write a joke book, a craft book, or a local history book – we’re keen for groups to tailor their bookmaking to the interests of their local members, highlighting the huge variety that non-fiction comes in.
We hope this approach will enable local groups to get creative and enjoy making physical books, as well as further developing links they may have established during 2016’s National Share-a-Story Month, with local venues.
We’ve created a free resource pack available for all to download, to facilitate in brainstorming and planning a session or two around writing and publishing your own non-fiction book as a group.
The activity pack mentions several additional resources which you can also download for free:
Click here to download the non-fiction Guess Which Book game – a book take on the classic Guess Who game. This pack, which contains lots of book covers (used with permission), can also be used to create displays and play memory guessing games.
Author Catherine Barr (‘Elliot’s Arctic Surprise’, ‘The Story of Life’) has developed a framework for running non-fiction book creation competitions in schools and book groups. You can download her activity pack, full of resources and a step by step guide to the competition workshop here:
Catherine is available to do school visits and can be contacted via Twitter @catherine_barr
One further resource we’ve created, with the hope that it makes it a little easier to book non-fiction authors, illustrators and book creators for events at book groups, in schools and libraries, is a leaflet (free for anyone to use) with background information and contact details for a variety of non-fiction authors/illustrators/book creatre:
November 2016 will see the return of our “30 Days of Adventures in the Real World” initiative – news, views, and giveaways highlighting the breadth, depth and richness of non-fiction for children and young people, here on the FCBG blog, elsewhere online and in traditional media too.
We’re really looking forward to seeing how you all choose to celebrate everything that is brilliant about non-fiction for children and young people this November.