Fact or fiction?

Now this is a book that teachers, librarians and those of us who teach research skills will approve –

Two Truths and a Lie: it’s alive! by Ammi-Joan Paquette & Laurie Ann Thompson is a pretty fun book that teaches us about the natural world (plants, animals and us, humans, too) but promotes critical thinking and digging for the truth, along the way.

The book is divided into three parts each focused on either plants, animals or humans. Each part has three chapters and within each chapter there are three stories written loosely connected about a particular topic. 

Now, the three stories within a chapter has two stories based on facts and one that is fabricated.  All the stories capture the mystical nature and sometimes strange wonder of the natural world making it tricky to figure out which one might be the ‘lie’. The fake story often does contain bits of information that is true but the overarching information is false.

Along the way, there are pull-out boxes that give us additional information, quick lists of true or false statements to research, define words, provide maps and photos, and suggest activities and tips on research.  The answers are provided at the back of the book as well as a bibliography of the sources the writers consulted.

The introduction sets up the book, what to expect and how to read through it.

A section at the back of the book provides the reader with suggestions on how they might tackle figuring out which stories are true and which are not. It promotes using the internet and how to best work through the information found there. They caution the reader to be extra careful as there are people out there who intentionally want to fool us into believing false information. Selecting reliable sources, checking these sources, verifying information from more than one source, visiting libraries and thinking critically about what you’re reading are outlined in the book and promoted as crucial for good research.

This will appeal to a certain kind of reader who will likely be keen to work through it on their own but I think this book will have a bigger appeal for classroom work teaching research and critical thinking skills. The stories have a ‘wow’ factor that holds the reader’s attention and then there’s the gaming element that presents a challenge of figuring out fact from fiction.

I can see introducing this book to student-teachers when I next hold a workshop about information literacy or dealing with ‘fake news’.

I highly recommend this book for grades 4 to 8 but could see it being used at higher levels, as well.