Detective Abby: Oh hey, story sleuths! I’ve been exploring the park  near the R. E. A. D. Agency lately. There are flowers, weeds, bugs —  all kinds of interesting things.

And I want to learn more about them! So, you guessed it: I’m going to need some books. I’m Detective Abby, and this is  Crash Course Kids Literature.

[0:17] [THEME MUSIC]

[0:22] Detective Abby: The kind of books I’m looking for are nonfiction books. As you probably know, they’re about real people, places, and events. And there are lots of kinds of nonfiction. Biographies are stories of real people.

News stories are about events happening right now. And there are also textbooks, recipes,  informational articles online, and even…wait for it… educational YouTube videos! Usually, nonfiction texts include special features  that give us even more information about a topic.

Maps, diagrams, and photos can show us  more about where or how things happen. Glossaries define important terms. And a table of contents and index can help us find things inside a book.

They’re like a built-in detective agency! Nonfiction texts give us a lot of information. But nonfiction authors still don’t tell us everything there is to know about a topic.

Instead, they pick what they think  are the most important details. Then, they put those details together to help us readers make connections and understand cause and effect, or how one thing leads to another. For example, the other day I wore this  coat with the flowers on it to the park.

Suddenly, a bee landed on me. I tried to shoo it away, but it kept  coming back to the flowers on my coat. Eventually, I figured out that the  bee thought the flowers were real!

It was trying to pollinate my coat! Nice try, bee. So, in that story, you can see how the kind of coat I was wearing was an important detail.

The pattern on my coat was the cause, and  the bee being attracted to me was the effect. Now let’s investigate the important details in two nonfiction books about nature. Both “The Girl Who Drew Butterflies” and “Summer Birds” are nonfiction texts about the same person who studied it.

While we read, we can ask questions—like who, what, when, where, why, and how—to find out important details. Here are our case notes. Let’s start with “Summer Birds,” written by Margarita Engle and illustrated by Julie Paschkis.

This book is a simple picture book. And who is it about? A person named Maria Merian.

Okay, now what is the story about? Maria says that everyone around her believes  butterflies are evil and come from mud. But she doesn’t believe those things—she’s painted insects and has seen how they  lay eggs, grow, and develop.

So, we have our “what”: butterflies. Maria is fascinated by butterflies. She dreams of one day traveling to “faraway  lands” to paint more flowers and butterflies.

She says she’ll publish a book  with all of her paintings, and “Then everyone will know the truth about  small animals that change their forms.” The historical note at the end of the  book tells us more, including that Maria eventually accomplished her dreams of traveling  and telling the world about flowers and insects. We can learn even more about Maria by  synthesizing, or putting together the information we’ve learned so far with new  information from other nonfiction texts. That’s why we’re going to look at another set of case notes—for our next book.

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies “The Girl Who Drew Butterflies” by Joyce Sidman is  a longer, more detailed biography of Maria Merian. It tells us the when: Maria was born in 1647. And it tells us the where: she grew up in Germany.

Now, how about the why? We learn that Maria started drawing and observing flowers and insects because  her stepfather was an artist. And that also hints at how Maria became such a good artist, too.

Maria’s stepfather taught her to draw, and  she helped him by finding flowers to paint. Because this book has more complex information, it includes some of those important nonfiction features, like  a glossary, a timeline, and an index. It also has maps, diagrams, and  sidebars that provide context.

Providing context means sharing details about the world the story is happening within. For example, we learn that, at this time in history, women in Germany weren’t allowed to work. Most people thought it was a woman’s job to get married, have children, and support her husband.

This is important context: it helps us understand that when Maria kept observing and painting caterpillars, she was doing something that wasn’t expected of her. Which likely required some bravery. So you see, context helps us understand much more about how and why things  happened the way they did.

Throughout the book, we also get to  see lots of images that show what Maria’s life may have been like, and  examples of the art that she created. Like, one page shows a picture she made of  a garden tiger moth on a hyacinth flower. In it, we can clearly see all the stages of development Maria observed—the eggs, the caterpillar, the pupa, and the full-grown moth.

She published a book of her scientific observations, called “New Book of Flowers.” The book changed the way people  viewed plants, insects, and science. She did that! Nonfiction books can answer the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how about real people and events.

Reading lots of texts about the same subject can help us understand even more. And paying attention to which details authors include and how they put them together helps us make connections. I’m off to check out some more flowers.

I’ll see you later, story sleuths! Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Kids Literature, which was filmed at the Complexly studio in Indianapolis, Indiana and was made with the help of all these artistic people.