Nonfiction Books In Spanish For Kids
Nonfiction books in Spanish are a must for our house hold! Not only are they a great source of information and interest for my kiddo, but they help build my daughter’s Spanish vocabulary in so many ways.
In this post I’ll talk about the benefits of informational books for kids, the many reasons why nonfiction books benefit language learners and our favorite Spanish nonfiction books.
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As a non-native Spanish speaker, I am most concerned that I’m not providing the highest level of Spanish for my daughter.
I know that my Spanish vocabulary is not as high as my English vocabulary, by a long shot, and that seems normal for most language learners.
I think about the amount of words that I would use a day in English and I know that I’m not providing that level, depth or variety for my daughter in Spanish.
There are several studies that show that children raised to speak a language by a non-native speaker often have smaller vocabularies in that language than children raised by native speakers, and that exposure to native speakers is one of the greatest ways to augment language growth.
To read more about raising a truly bilingual child, check out this post:
The Challenges of True Bilingualism In A Monolingual Culture
Table of Contents
How Can I Boost Spanish Vocabulary?
Some of the most obvious ways to boost my daughter’s Spanish language would be a dual immersion school or native Spanish speaking nannies, both of which aren’t options for our family.
Instead, I need to work extra hard to make sure that I’m giving my daughter the highest quality of Spanish that I can. While I realize that I’ll never be able to give her what a native speaker can, there are ways that I can beef up the level of Spanish language that she hears.
In a previous post I talked about a great nonfiction show that we watch, you can read more about that here:
An Educational Spanish Kids Show That You Need To See!
Why Nonfiction Books Work
One way that I make sure that my daughter hears a depth of Spanish language is by reading nonfiction books. There are so many ways in which nonfiction books are helpful to language learners.
Real Images/Photographs
Many nonfiction books contain real images or photographs of their topic. The use of real images is a great way to build language skills with children learning a new language because it directly builds context for what they’re reading about. When you’re reading a shark book to your child and there’s a diagram of a real shark, with all of the body parts labeled, it’s very easy for children to assimilate that vocabulary because it leaves nothing to be assumed – the real world image is in front of them along with the new vocabulary.
Real images also provide a greater context for the topic. When children see the shark in water, eating a fish, they’re able to connect all of those words together to create schema for a topic.
Higher Level Vocabulary
Nonfiction books tend to use a higher level of vocabulary and more technical terms than fiction books. They can also use vocabulary that isn’t part of everyday speech. This is one of the greatest reasons that I have for reading nonfiction to my daughter.
My everyday Spanish language doesn’t have the technical vocabulary that it needs to answer all the questions that my daughter asks about how the world works. When we’re reading nonfiction books together, I’m answering all of her questions and providing the language that we both need to talk about the world around us in greater detail.
Building School Success
Schools are increasingly pushing the use of informational and nonfiction texts. The Common Core State Standards identified a huge gap in college preparedness in regards to students being able to think critically about nonfiction texts. The standards now emphasize nonfiction texts beginning primary grades where they specify that 50% of all reading material should be nonfiction.
When I look critically at my daughter’s Spanish book collection I notice that only about 25% of it is nonfiction books. In order to prepare my daughter for language success, I need to make sure that she’s getting a high quality of nonfiction input each day.
I’m constantly on the lookout for Spanish books for our home collection and I’ve found that getting quality nonfiction books is much harder than finding fiction ones.
Our local library doesn’t have any nonfiction Spanish books, and most of the book stores near us carry a very small nonfiction selection. Even Club Leo, which is one of my top places to find Spanish books, has a small nonfiction selection.
Which Nonfiction Books In Spanish To Use?
To help you on your search, here are the nonfiction series that we have enjoyed the most, and where you can find them.
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National Geographic Kids Readers
This series of books is translated from the English series by National Geographic Kids. There are dozens of books in the series on a wide range of topics and all of the books have their own leveling system.
“Pre-Lector” (prereader) books are the most basic and often include only 1 phrase per page. “Nivel 3” (Level 3) is the highest and contains a good amount of information and usually 2 paragraphs per page.
I like that these books have high quality photographs and lots of labels, making it really easy for us to get that good technical vocabulary. They also come in a good range of topics, not just animal books (which tend to dominate the nonfiction book world for children). We’ve had good luck finding these at Barnes and Noble, Scholastic Club Leo, and online at Amazon. Here are some of our favorites:
Scholastic Explora Tu Mundo (Explore Your World)
This is another strong nonfiction series of books that you can get through Scholastic. I like that they are hard cover, strong quality books. They also come in a range of topics (though almost exclusively science topics) and they have a digital component.
You can go online at the provided website and type in your book code and download extra activities in Spanish right on their website. Here are some of our favorites:
¿Quien Fue?
This is a great nonfiction series of books that explores different famous personalities as well as many famous events. We started checking these out from the library when I was looking for more Spanish biographies to read to my daughter.
As we learned more about the series we started to get into some of the other parts of the series like “que es” or “que fue” which explore important events like the World Cup or the Declaration of Independence.
Each book is about 100 pages long and often includes illustrations or black & white photographs from the time period that it explores. Here are some more of our favorites:
¿Que? ¿Como? ¿Por Que? (What? How? Why?)
These are beautiful, large, hardcover books that have spiral binding. They hold up well and have a wealth of information inside of them!
My daughter went through a huge phase where she was excited by ‘lift the flap’ books and these were her favorite nonfiction books during that phase. Each page has a few flaps to lift that include extra images or information about the topic on that page.
These books don’t usually have photographs, but the images are realistic and have good attention to detail. The series covers a wide range of topics from history to math to animals. Here are some of our favorites:
Usborne Leyendo Aprendo
Another series that we really love is the Usborne nonfiction series, “Leyendo Aprendo”. These hard cover books are on the smaller side, only about 8 inches tall. They come in a range of science related topics (not many historical topics) and include a mix of photographs and depicted drawings.
One thing that I really appreciate about this series is the kid friendly language and explanations for the topics covered. The pages often include lists or bullet points to break down the information and the glossaries have mini images next to the words to aid in understanding.
Here are some of our favorites:
Other Favorite Nonfiction Books
I’m always on the lookout for high quality Spanish nonfiction books for kids. Here are a few of the gems that I’ve found that are not part of a series, or that we only have one of the books in the series.
This books is a great guide to talking to children about skin color. It has beautiful full page photographs and ideas for follow up activities at the end. A great nonfiction book for the family.
When my daughter was old enough to do science experiments this book was a great guide for us! A fun nonfiction book full of experiments for families to do together with great illustrations and explanations.
These DK guides have a ton of information and are great for older children or for use as reference guides.
I’m always looking for ways to boost my daughter’s Spanish vocabulary and exposure. If you have any other good suggestions for what’s worked well for you, let me know in the comments!
Happy Learning!
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