Biography Reports

 Who Was...THE KING, BABY!

 Who Was...Claude Monet

 Who Was...Steven Spielberg

 Who Was...Steve Jobs

Who Was...Barack Obama

In December, I displayed a huge number of titles from the WHO WAS series on the desks in our classroom while they were in specials.  When they returned to the room…we went SHOPPING!  We discussed the many ways you choose a book (book cover, friend recommendation, know about a book and want to know more, etc.) and spent 25 minutes moving around the desks, investigating the various titles available to them.  They meandered, read the backs of the books, some read the introduction of a few books that interested them, and talked with one another about who they were interested in knowing more about.  As we all started reading a WIDE variety of books, we talked about what biographies have in common, why they are written and how they differ from autobiographies.  As we read, we not only discussed what was interesting about our person, but started taking notes too.  Note taking can be difficult and kids need to practice taking the time to write down something they learned, a question they have, or a fact they want to remember as they read.  We often use sticky notes as we read in our reading books (the space of a sticky note isn’t intimidating and they stick in the book as we read) and are then able to talk about things we noticed while reading using our notes.  After break, we continued working on our biographies (most kids had finished reading the book by this time) and we moved on to the final project.  Using the information we wrote on our goldenrod Biography Notes paper, we used started our WHO AM I!? writing.