Writing nonfiction for early readers is a challenge. You want to share as much as you can about your topic, but children who are just learning to read can’t read many words by themselves yet. Much of what you want to say requires words that are too difficult for these beginning readers to read by themselves.

When I was teaching kindergarten and first grade we often used poems and songs to share new information. Poems and songs use rhythm, rhyme, and repetition to tell a story. The rhythm keeps young readers going line by line as the words flow from one to the other. Rhyme makes its easy to remember the words, because many of the words become predictable. And with repetition, the third poetic device, you are using the same words over and over. That is precisely how children learn to read, by seeing the same words over and over again. In a book for children just learning to read, using repeating words and phrases also gives beginning readers fewer new words to learn all at once.

Using an old song with new words is another tools teachers use, so I decided to try that with this biography. When I was a child we sang “The Muffin Man” song:

Oh, do you know the muffin man,
The muffin man, the muffin man,
Oh, do you know the muffin man,
That lives on Drury Lane?

Oh, yes, I know the muffin man,
The muffin man, the muffin man,
Oh, yes, I know the muffin man,
That lives on Drury Lane.

I changed the words to fit my topic…

Oh, do you know the apple man,
the apple man,
the apple man?

Do you know the apple man?
Johnny Appleseed.

I adapted the text to the easy reader format, and broke the second line into two. I also spread the text over 2 facing pages. Books for beginning readers only have a few lines of text on each page.

In very simple readers, the art also tells part of the story, so I made a note to add Johnny Appleseed’s real name, John Chapman, to this page as well. The teacher could read it to the children (and I wouldn’t have to find a way to make it fit into the rhyme).

Now that I had my pattern, I needed to see if I could use it to tell his story.

After Chapman collected seeds from the apple presses (which is shown in the art on the first page of text), he traveled across the country planting apple trees. He carried those apple seeds in leather bags. When he traveled down river, he tied two canoes together. How did that look as a rhyme? I created a new repeating phrase, “across this land” to show how he traveled.

He carried seeds
across this land,
across this land,
across this land.

He carried seeds
across this land.
Johnny Appleseed.

I used this new repeating phrase for the rest of the book to create a biography in song. The children can see his life and in the end of the book I bought it back to the reader with a text to self connection, so the children can see how it affects them…

We eat apples
across this land,
across this land,
across this land.

We eat apples
across this land.
Thanks to Johnny Appleseed.

Booktalk

Johnny Appleseed travels across the land planting apple seeds in this biography in song for beginning readers. His story is larger than life, but John Chapman was a real person who shared his love of apple trees with the pioneers who settled the midwest. This “Sing and Read Book” is Level C social studies nonfiction for kindergarten and first grade.

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