Yesterday, I began a series on Building a Nonfiction Classroom Library. At this point, I am not exactly certain how many parts it will be. Originally, I was thinking I would do one a day for five days. However, the more I thought about it, the more I decided to focus on several things:

Nonfiction Book Recommendations
Choosing Books and Developing Your Collection
Using Nonfiction in the Classroom to Support Writing

When I started to think about categories, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize book recommendations. Do I use writing styles such as narrative, expository, and persuasive? Or do I think about text structures (description, sequence, problem & solution, question & answer, cause & effect, comparison & contrast). Neither felt like a natural way of dividing up books or making recommendations. However, both of these - writing style and text structure - play a huge role in using nonfiction in the classroom. So, we will return to this in future posts.

Finally, I settled on how I would divide books into tubs in a classroom. This may not be how a librarian would sort them, but as a teacher, this is likely where I would look for them if I am going to use them as part of lessons.

My first set of tubs would be biographies.

Below you will find 40 titles by 20 different authors to include as you build your classroom library. By clicking on the author's name, you will be taken to his or her GoodReads page where you can see more information about the covers shown below as well as additional books by many of these authors. It was difficult to narrow down my list to just these authors since there are many more that I have loved. However, I tried to choose authors who had more than one title (yes, I have a few exceptions) and also tried to aim for some diversity though I have a ways to go to truly be diverse.

For more recommendations, here is a link to my GoodReads Shelf: Biographies. In 2013, I wrote a post for the Nerdy Book Club about my Top Ten Biographical Picture Books and the way I would pair them with another book. Though my top ten has likely changed since then, there are several more titles listed there.

In a future post, I will explore biographical series created by a publisher, and those can be selected and included as well in a classroom library.

Stop by on Friday, for my favorite nonfiction picture books about animals.