Writing Opportunity: Table of Contents

As many of you know, we’ve been working on writing and submitting a nonfiction picture book to Kaeden Books. (If some of you are new to following my blog, you can CLICK HERE to start with the very first post I made about this adventure and get caught up.)

If you’ve not yet finished writing the text and the sidebars for your story, go ahead and get that finished up.

Today let’s talk about adding in the Table of Contents.

Some of you may be wondering why books such as The Bird Feeder have a Table of Contents. I mean, this is a short short book. Not very much text. That’s probably how your manuscript is, too.

It’s because of the Common Core State Standards. For example, if you look at the standards in second grade RI.2.5, you’ll see that this standard states:

Know and use various text features (e.g., captions, bold print, subheadings, glossaries, indexes, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text efficiently.

So simply by adding in a Table of Contents to your manuscript/book, it now supports the Common Core.

So go ahead and add a Table of Contents to your manuscript. If you have questions how to do that, look at your mentor text (The published book on Kaeden Books that is similar to the one you’re writing.)

First you’ll need to add page numbers to your own manuscript and then plug those page numbers into your Table of Contents. The main thing is to make sure your pages will be in the right layout for when the book is actually published.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Filed under: Beginning Readers, common core state standards, Nonfiction