•Type of fiction (not true) •Accurately reflects life as it could be lived today •Everything in the story could happen to real people•The characters have normal human powers •May be set in real places, but NOT based on history and there are no elements of science fiction

REALISTIC FICTION

3rd Grade Titles

• Based on the life of a real person• Biographies: stories of a real person's life, written or told by someone else • Autobiographies stories of a real person’s life, written or told by that person.

BIOGRAPHY

3rd Grade Titles

Book involves one or more of these things: • strangeness • solving a puzzling event or situation • something unknown • solving a crime • a person who investigates wrongdoing • a person whose job is to obtain secret information

MYSTERY

3rd Grade Titles

• Stories told in rhyme or in verse• Sometimes has patterns and rhythm, sometimes it does not • Written to create thought and feeling in the reader

POETRY

3rd Grade Titles

• Help readers learn more about real things• Information is based on known, true facts • Nothing can be “made up” or “pretend”• Includes how-to books, science books, history books• Can be about any subject – games, castles, sports, hobbies, etc.

INFORMATIONAL

3rd Grade Titles

• Stories that often tell about science and technology of the future • Involve partially true laws or theories of science • Setting can be: in space, on a different world, in a different universe

SCIENCE FICTION

3rd Grade Titles

Contains elements that are not realistic • talking animals • magical powers • often set in a medieval universe • possibly involving mythical beings

FANTASY

3rd Grade Titles

• Characters/events relate to a specific time in history• Based on history with fictional main characters• Sometimes include real people from history• Good way to understand a period of the past

HISTORICAL FICTION

3rd Grade Titles

How do you choose?

Five finger test Hold up five fingers Read one page in the middle of the book Put one finger down for every word you

don’t know If any fingers are left up once you reach

the end… It might be a good book for you?

How do you choose?

Book length? Ordinary language? Chapters (How many? How long?) Do you like the genre? Do you like the topic? Does is sound interesting to you? Does it pass the five finger test?