Non-Fiction Writing Project For Kids: How To Create Your Very Own ‘Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia’ Entry

The Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia series is a series of non-fiction books for kids. Each book focuses on a specific topic and each double-page spread within a book represents its own entry, and looks like this (this is from the classroom edition of the book on Our Solar System):

This structure makes creating Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia-style entries about any topics you wish well-suited to educational home and classroom projects. Specifically, the combination of locating relevant information, summarising it, writing it in a form that others will understand and adding a drawing prompt, not only encourages children to learn more about a specific topic, it also helps them learn about non-fiction writing and how to present factual information. This makes creating Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia entries a fun and educational way for children to learn about non-fiction writing.

If you are a teacher working with a class, there is the added benefit that you can assign specific topics to individual students or groups, and then bring the resulting pages together to create a whole encyclopaedia chapter that your students can share with each other, and/or take home to show their parents.

If you would like to create your own Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia entry, or do do this as a classroom project, you can download a A4 PDF handout that contains instructions on how to create a Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia entry, blank templates which can be filled in, and an example of an entry from Draw Your Own Encyclopaedia Our Solar System Classroom Edition by Colin M. Drysdale. You can download this PDF from here.