Creating Lives: An Introduction to Biography

Activities

For the purpose of this unit, activities will be broken up into two categories 1) foundational activities and 2) project based activities. The foundational activities are designed to help students learn the genre of biography and oral history while the second categories allows students to apply their new found knowledge to a real life situation. Below is a sample of activities from each category. The final project will likely include mini-lessons on topics that students are not readily familiar with.

Foundational Activities

Defining Biography Part I - Think-Pair-Share and KWL Chart

Students will jot down a response to the question "what is biography?" in their journals. The will then get into pairs, and share their responses. After student have had time to share with a classmate, I will call on a few pairs to report out their thoughts to the class. Their responses will make up our preliminary definition of biography as a class which we will add to the "K" column of a KWL chart. Next, in pairs, students will create a list of at least 5 questions they have about the genre of biography. We will frequently revisit these questions as we continue to study the genre of biography. The idea is that over the course of our study we will answer these questions and add more questions as we continue to learn more about biography.

Defining Biography Part II - Think Aloud and Read Aloud

I've chosen a short biography from Temescal Legacies to "think aloud" with my my students. The biographies in this book are no more than a page in length, easy to read, and relevant to the communities my students come from. It is important at this stage for me to chose a biography that is of a lower reading level than my students because I want to challenge them in thinking about the genre of biography without getting stuck on vocabulary and other writing choices that may make it difficult for students to engage in the discussion.

I will read this biography aloud using my overhead projector and give each student a copy so that they can read along with me and make notes on their own copy. I will interject a few times to note when the author is making an important writing choice that relates to biography or when I notice some of the characteristics we identified in the class with our KWL chart. This shouldn't take too long as I don't want students to get bored; the objective is to model good reading habits, not lecture about the content. When I am done reading and note-taking I will open the lesson for questions and comments from the students. The think aloud model allows me to show students what I expect from them when they take their own notes during the next stage, the read aloud.

Students will receive a packet of three short biographies which they will "read aloud" and take notes on. After reading each biography aloud, students will be asked to highlight and take notes on key elements of a biography. They will also answer the question "how do you know this is a biography?" There are two possible groupings I may use for this: students may work independently or I may have them work in small groups. Once everyone is done with the read alouds we will add any new key elements students found to the "L" column of our KWL chart. I will have to make sure that any key elements that students did not "discover" make it to the final list. For example, I want to make sure that we include point of view, purpose, voice, and "through line" to the "learned" column.

Extension Activity - Reading a Full Length Biography

Depending upon time limits and the strengths of my class, I may introduce a full-length biography, at this time. This will give us more time to explore the stylistic choices of the writer, their own assumptions, and point of view.

Defining Oral History - Inductive Model Data Set

In addition to some of the same activities utilized for introducing biography I will also create an "oral history" data set. This will allow me to front load information and show the various ways in which an oral history can look. The data set will have four categories: first-person narrative, third-person narrative, definitions, and issues with oral history. I will not give students these categories; instead, they will have to come up with their own based on what they read. Students will be given several short excerpts based on each category and will have to sort out each excerpt and create categories. This means that students are getting crucial information in small enough chunks to read easily. It will also require students to show their comprehension by categorizing the information.

Exploring Oral History - Literature Circles

Students will be broken into groups of four and each small group will read an oral history and discuss it. Usually I allow groups to pick which book they would like to read as this creates buy-in for each student to complete the assignment. I've developed a book group discussion protocol for my classroom in which the students are given an essential question and then asked to discussion it. For this assignment, the essential question is, "How does oral history help us tell a more a complete story of the past and present?" To help answer this question, I will ask students in their small groups to write a short factual biography of their main subject and then compare that to the oral history. I think this will help them see that oral history adds narrative, perspective, feeling, and emotion to an event or simple facts.

If I can, I would like to pick one event in history and have each group read a different oral history from people during that same time period. This way, we can discuss how oral history can benefit our understanding of an event by adding multiple perspectives.

On-Going Homework - ABC/PQC Response

To demonstrate their understanding of our essential questions and readings, students will be required to write two ABC/PQC responses each week. These short responses will give students a chance to share what they learned and what they think about biography and oral history. I can also use these responses to address many of the state standards around literary analysis (see Appendix A).

Project-Based Activities

Daily Warm-Up Activity - See, Think, Wonder

At the beginning of each day, we will use the See, Think, Wonder strategy with an image from one of our school yearbooks or Images of America: Emeryville. Students will have a daily worksheet divided into 5 boxes. The image will be projected onto the screen at the front of the room and students will have to write for 5 minutes silently on what they see, what they think about it, and what they wonder. After they write silently we will go over the image together as a class. This will take about ten minutes and allow students to get into the frame of mind of analyzing images and making predictions about them. My hope is that this will ignite student interest to investigate our school's history.

Exit tickets

At the end of most classes, students will be required to complete an exit ticket before they can leave. I may ask students a question that they should have learned the answer to that day, what was challenging that day, or what they learned that day. Students write their responses on an index card or post-it note and turn it in to me before they leave the class. This is a quick way for me to monitor my students' learning and reflect on what went well and what I can improve on as a teacher. I usually post some exit tickets up around the classroom as a reminder of what students have already learned during the unit.

Investigation of school yearbooks

Our school library houses yearbooks dating back to 1937. In collaboration with our librarian, students will work together to research and gather information from these yearbooks. In pairs or groups of three, students will review at least 2 yearbooks and come up with a summary of their findings. Their summary must include a short list of at least 5 interesting pages from the yearbook, a brief summary of what made them interesting and what they learned from these pages. Each group must also answer the following questions about the yearbooks in general:

• What do you notice about life at Emery during this time period?
• What was similar and different from now?
• What was surprising to you?
• What questions would you ask someone in this yearbook?
• What else did you notice?
• What hypotheses can you make about life at Emery during this time?

We will then have a gallery walk in which students will share the yearbooks and summary of their findings while their classmates walk around and view them. As students walk around they will have to either make a connection to something they found in their yearbooks or something they know about Emery currently. After, the hypotheses will be written as large posters on the wall. We will return to these hypothesis after students interview alums and other members of the school community. This activity is designed to build students' ability to critically analyze images and text in a historical context as well as make comparisons and hypotheses.

Questioning - Socratic Seminar

We will begin brainstorming questions to ask alums and community members through a Socratic seminar. The main texts for this Socratic seminar are the yearbooks. Students will be asked the night before to answer the following question "If you could ask someone that attended Emery in the past anything, what would you ask them? What time period(s) would they come from? The following day students will discuss their answers in a Socratic seminar and come up with a brainstorm list of possible questions to ask. I will use this brainstorm to teach a mini-lesson on the difference between open-ended, closed, and follow-up questions. Students can then modify and/or eliminate any close ended questions. Then, we can create a solid list of potential interview questions. At this time, we will decide as a class if there is a specific set of questions that everyone will ask or if they want to choose their own questions.

Model interview - FIshbowl

I will bring in a counselor who has worked at our school for 40 years to model an interview in front of the entire class. I will use questions from the list we created in the previous activity. While I interview the counselor, students must note what they think I did well and what I could have improved on, we will discuss their analysis after the interview.

Interviewing Classmates

In preparation for interviewing community members, students will first interview each other. The benefits of this process are that it allows students to go through the entire process with someone they are comfortable with and allows me to monitor their skills. Second, it gives them space to make adjustments to their own interviewing process before they interview someone from the larger community. Classmates will then write out the biographies of their partners and share them with the class. These biographies will be included in the final presentation.

Interviewing Alums and Community Members

Students will work in partners and be responsible for finding two people to interview. For each interview, a different partner will be the lead interviewer while the other partner will take notes and act as an assistant. Each pair will be responsible for interviewing one alum and one other type of member of the school community. Students will also be responsible for arranging their interviews. I will create time to do this while they are conducting interviews with their classmates so that they have sufficient time to make arrangements. One possibility is that we could host an interview "night" where school and community members could come by and be interviewed. This would provide a safe place for the students to interview and it may bring up old memories for the subjects being interviewed. In addition to interviewing their subjects, students will also be required to take pictures of them which will be included in the final presentation.

Students will use recording devices and note taking to capture the interviews. Before they can conduct these interviews, they will need to have a consent form signed (see Appendix B) by their subjects. This is for legal reasons and is meant to make the subject at ease knowing the purpose of the interview.

Writing Biographies

The first stage will be to write a one page biography of the subject's life. Each student will be responsible for writing one of the biographies and revising his or her partner's. Students will not be required to transcribe the entire interview; instead, they will take notes from the audio recording and use those to write their biographies. This will encourage students to write biographies rather than first person narratives and put the subjects' stories into their own words. During the writing process, students will be required to create a brainstorm, an outline, a first draft revised by her partner, a second draft revised by me, and a final draft. When writing, we will pay specific attention to the elements of discourse, organization, and focus as outlined by the California State Standards (see Appendix A). I will also use VTS to model revising and editing skills with my students. I will ask each student to volunteer a paragraph of their biography and I will chose a few of those to edit in front of the class (they will be anonymous). I will also use a rubric to grade all final drafts of written work.

The second page of the biography will be based on a theme chosen by the students. As a class, we will pick 4-6 themes that show up throughout the interviews; for example, themes might include school activities, slang, sports or academics. From these themes each student will decide which one(s) their subject covers and which one of those they want to write about. They will then write 2-3 paragraph summaries of what their subject said about this theme and transcribe an excerpt from the interview. The transcription is meant to give voice to the person interviewed.

Presenting Themes

For the final presentation, the biographies and photographs will be grouped into the designated themes so that comparisons can easily be made between time periods. These will be displayed on large foam core for our school wide exhibition. This exhibition is open to the community at large and we will invite everyone who participated in the project.We will also create a binder of all of the interviews and pictures and donate it to the school library. Eventually, these should be put onto a website however I am not that technologically savvy yet.

Another key part of this presentation will be for students to share their reflections on the interview process, what they learned, and what conclusions they have made. This gives students a chance to think about their own learning process and what content they learned. Presenting these reflections will also help the audience gain further insight into the process of creating biographies and oral histories.