I just finished doing a series of booktalks at local elementary schools to promote our summer reading program. I’m providing a list of the non-fiction books that the kids seem most interested in and, in my humble opinion, are the most fun to talk about. I have all my booktalks saved, so if you need them, just let me know and I can send them to you. (One observation–the kids LOVE to hear about non-fiction titles) Thanks to Kathleen Baxter who writes for SLJ and presented nonfiction booktalks at this year’s PLa conference. A lot of the following titles were recommended by her.

How Angel Peterson Got His Name by Gary Paulsen

How to Find Lost Treasure in all 50 states…and Canada too by Joan Holub

**The Haunted States of America by Joan Holub

Calculator Riddles by David Adler

In the Land of Words: new and selected poems by Eloise Greenfield

The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon by Bea Uusma Schyffert

Outside and Inside Giant Squid by Sandra Markle

The Blood-Hungry Spleen and other poems about our parts by Allan Wolf

Wonderful Words: poems about reading, writing, speaking, and listening selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Scholastic Visual Sports Encyclopedia

**The Encyclopedia of Preserved People: Pickled, Frozen and mummified corpses from around the world by Natalie Jane Prior

**Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty by Joy Masoff

**Close to Shore: the terrifying shark attacks of 1916 by Michael Capuzzo

The ones with stars are the really big hits!