The Art of Biography

Teaching Strategies

While engaging in the Art of Biography seminar, I learned various strategies to use with the students in my classroom. Here I will describe how I will employ the different strategies I read about, observed through the seminar experience, listened to other teachers share, as well as what I think are best practices for students in second grade.

Keeping a Writer's Notebook

My school and school district is adopting the Reader's and Writer's Workshop approach constructed by Lucy Calkins. Meanwhile, the university we partner with houses teams of teachers involved in the National Writing Project. With these influences I have learned the value of having students keep a writing notebook. In order to get students to see themselves as writers, it's important to give them a special place for writing. By introducing students to a Writer's Notebook they are hooked into writing and this space marks the beginning of their little lives as writers for the year. One of the things I like to do is wrap notebooks and give them to students as gifts. Once students receive their Writer's Notebook, they are given time to decorate the cover to make it special for them. This allows students to create artistic ownership over their book and makes them care for it even more.

Keeping a writer's notebook lends itself greatly to the idea of autobiography. In her book Living Between the Lines Lucy Calkins writes that "notebooks have embodied the idea that we put bits of our lives and our thinking into print not only to produce compositions but also because we do not want to walk around unwritten." The purpose of keeping a writing notebook is for students to keep track of their lives. "Notebooks can become a habit of life, one that helps us recognize that our lives are filled with material for writing." Another great thing about keeping a writer's notebook is that students have something to reference when they are writing. They can flip back through and use information from their own writing to start creating drafts of stories that highlight their living and who they are as a person. It is very important for teachers to model keeping a writer's notebook her/himself, in order for students to see it as a habit and best practice. The teacher must have experience and motivation to use it first. "If we keep notebooks ourselves and move from those notebooks into larger writing projects, then we can anticipate and respond to the predictable problems that will emerge. But more than this, if we keep notebooks, we will expect and welcome diversity." (11)

Art Integration

Integrating art into the content of reading and writing provides an opportunity for students to engage with visual representations and make meaning of them. It is sometimes easier for students to interpret art than it is for them to do with text. It can provide students with the opportunity to practice the skills they learn on an easier task, and then apply it to something more difficult – their autobiography. As the classroom teacher I will provide my students with portraits. Some schools have these resources available through an art department. They can also be printed in color from various websites and apps. Several resources you can explore to find art for use in your classroom include:

- Artspan: http://www.artspan.com/ (art is organized by categories, types, locations, and you can search just for "portraits")

- Devianart: http://www.deviantart.com/ (contemporary art including portraits of people students may recognize)

- Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/index.html (you can search by location, theme, time period, etc)

- National Gallery of Art: http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/education/kids.html

- Art Gallery: +3000 Artists (this is a FREE iPad App)

- Google Images: https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi (you can type any category or topic into the search bar and access many responses)

*A caveat of advice is for the teacher to prepare the images for the students to view. You may not want to conduct this search in front of your students as some of the results will not be age/grade appropriate.*

I will group students into partners or small groups and they will look at the same portrait and respond to it. Students will initially respond to the art through journal writing so that they reflect using their own personal ideas and reactions before listening to someone else's. This gives all students the opportunity to have a voice in responding to the subject. Then students will engage in a discussion with the other students who are sharing their portrait. This allows students to practice conversation skills of listening and thinking to understand different perspectives and develop an appreciation for how someone else may interpret something. When looking at the portraits, students will brainstorm and write about:

• What they see – describe the details of the portrait or the subject of the portrait
• What questions they have – what do they wonder about the portrait or the subject
• What connections they can make – does it relate to or make them think of anything they already know either from their own life, or from a book or from the world

Once students have responded to these questions in their notebook and discussed their responses with a peer or small group, then I will have them research the portrait for more information. Students can look up information about the portrait, the artist, the time period, etc. in order to learn more about the work. Our school has limited technology in the classroom and second grade students are only beginning to understand and fluently use technology as a tool for researching information they want to learn more about. So they will work with a partner in order to be more supported and successful at accomplishing this task.

After students have practiced looking at portraits, examining them in detail, and drawing their own conclusions, they can practice with other genres of art that involve characters within a setting. Students will begin to write a story related to the piece of artwork describing the scene that they see and how they interpret it. They will write about what is happening in the picture and create conflict and resolution for it. They will determine what is important to include in their story and what does not need to be described.

Creating Timelines

A springboard for students to use to start thinking about their own story is to create a personal timeline. Second grade students in North Carolina are expected to use timelines to sequence events, and a good indicator of their being able to accomplish this is by making a timeline to detail important events in their life. Second grade students have lived for about seven to eight years and will have certain memories and experiences. They may not necessarily know exact dates when things occurred, but they usually have a good idea of how old they are or in what season things happened. One way to help students get started is for the teacher to create a timeline modeling significant events in his/her life. In modeling a timeline for my students, I would start my timeline to include my birth date, the birth of my siblings, the month and year I started Kindergarten, High School, College, Teaching, and Graduate School. I would go back and add in the years I took memorable trips or when special things happened to me like graduations and my wedding. I would also make sure that there would be room on my paper to add on so students know that my timeline is open for more events to occur in my life.

After I have modeled how to create a timeline for my students, students will create theirs. I will encourage students to work independently for 10-15 minutes so they can focus on thinking about their own life, but then allow them the opportunity to talk and share so that they can piggy-back off the ideas and memories of their peers. One thing that as a class we will need to be sensitive to is that everyone's life and experiences are different and that it's important to value and respect each other's differences as well as similarities. This attitude will have to be fostered during beginning of the year activities, but depending on the students, it may need to be revisited before students share something personal like a timeline from their life.

Graphic Organizers

All students will be writing an autobiography and a biography in narrative form, but students benefit by having access to an organizer to help them gather their thoughts and ideas in order to sequence events, recall and highlight details, pick out important ideas, and dig deeper to gain more information. Especially when writing a biography, students can research important information, but use a graphic organizer to have it all available in one place for when they start the writing process. A great interactive website that allows students to do this is available on www.readwritethink.org. ReadWriteThink, sponsored by the International Reading Association has an interactive "Bio Cube" creator. It asks students for specific information and provides fields for them to input the information and creates a template for a 6 sided cube that can be printed on paper and cut, folded and pasted together in the shape of the cube so students can role it like a dice and share the information from each box. Because so many students are kinesthetic or active learners, this is a great way for them to be moving (by rolling the cube) and learning new information (by reading each box). Whether students are using it for biographical or autobiographical purposes, the same information is requested and it includes boxes or fields for: the person's name, time period, and place, personal background where a student can narrate or list important events, personality traits, significance, obstacles, and an important quote from the person.(12)

Another biography graphic organizer is one that I have created and use in my classroom. (See Appendix II and please feel free to modify to suit the needs of your classroom). I make a copy available to each student as a way for them to organize information as well as know what information to learn about when students are reading various sources. There is also space on it for "fun facts" where students can decide what is important or how they connect to their subject. If students are using the graphic organizer for an autobiography, what doesn't fit into the other categories that they want people to know about themselves can be included in the "fun facts" section.

Second grade students are very literal and while hopefully creativity will come out in the narratives that they write, they usually need to be directed into what should be included or how to start thinking about what they are doing. By providing them with a graphic organizer, students cannot use the excuse of "I don't know what to write."

Technology Integration

Second grade students at my school love using technology. Although our classroom has limited resources (by my standards), I try to use our three computers as much as possible. Throughout the unit students will be using the internet to conduct searches of biographical information about a chosen person. Websites I have found that include biographical information in very elementary-friendly language includes:

• Biographies for Kids – Famous Leaders for Young Readers http://www.gardenofpraise.com/leaders.htm
• Multimedia Biographies http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/biographies/index.html
• America's Story http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/index.php
• Biographies for Kids – Life Stories http://www.ducksters.com/biography/
• Bio.Classroom http://www.biography.com/tv/classroom

All of the above websites are linked to my classroom website and students have found them helpful when searching for information. The text and vocabulary are friendly and words are easily readable to a second grade student. In addition to searching for information about a person online, students can use the computers to create a presentation (either using PowerPoint or Prezi.com) to publish and share what they are learning about a person they are studying. Students can also use the computers to create a Bio Cube (described in the Graphic Organizer section).

Classroom Discussion

Second grade students are responsible for demonstrating success in speaking and listening standards. These standards expect students to participate in collaborative conversations, recount or describe key ideas and details, ask and answer questions about what a speaker is saying, tell a story or recount an experience, and produce complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation.(13) In order to provide students the possibility of learning from their peers, this curriculum unit naturally allows the opportunity for various classroom discussions. One of the things I like to do before starting a classroom discussion is to give students time to individually prepare to talk. I generate a prompt or idea and give students time to brainstorm their own response to it through journal writing or sketching. This is a great strategy to use because it sends the message to students that everyone is capable of having an idea and everyone's idea is important. It also allows students the time to organize their thinking so that they don't ramble on and on about something and kill the momentum of a conversation. Once students have been given an opportunity to individually respond to a discussion topic, they will then in small groups share their thinking with their peers. Some of the discussion topics or questions that naturally flow from the study of biography that can be discussed by second grade students are:

• What is biography?
• Why do we study biography?
• Who are your favorite types of people to learn about? What specific questions do you have about other people? What do you like to learn about other people?
• If someone was writing a biography about you, what would be important for that author to include?
• If you were to write a biography about someone you loved, who would you write about? Why would you write about that person? What important information would you make sure to include in that biography?
• What are some common characteristics you read in most biographies? (Students will have already have needed some experience with reading a variety of biographies either independently or as a read aloud prior to being able to discuss this topic).

Writing a Memoir

Lucy Calkins describes memoir as "the genre of our decade," arguing that it is about more than just a single moment, but also "about the plot lines or patterns that bind those moments together. The purpose of a memoir is to explore the significance of events." Through the writing of memoir students are "encouraged to tell not only what they did during those moments, but also what they thought and felt, and in this way, to make the moments add up, to make them reveal life as a whole." Beginning writers, like second graders, typically pick important moments from their life to write about – a birthday, a day at Carowinds (our local amusement park), going to a football or basketball game, playing in a soccer game, etc. In encouraging students to write memoir, Lucy Calkins claims it "has everything to do with rendering the ordinariness of our lives so that it becomes significant. Rather than recalling facts, we need to re-create worlds. Rather than writing with statistics, we need to write with scenes. Rather then reporting on our time line, we need to explore the truths that underlie it."

An exercise you can do in the classroom to get students to start writing a memoir is to have them start thinking about memories. This can be done through quiet reflection as well as sharing and discussing ideas, and of course capturing them and writing them down so they aren't forgotten. Students can brainstorm a list of memories they have and then think about the ones that are more vivid that they can use to craft their memoir. Once students begin recalling their memories, they're faced with turning them into memoirs. "The challenge of memoir is to discover memories that no one talks about, to document stories that haven't been told, and to draw conclusions that haven't been drawn."(14)

Lucy Calkins summarizes themes that are discovered in reading memoirs of others. "Memoirists often write about the places of their lives. Memoirists often write about their imaginations, about what they fantasize and fear, about their private, subjective experience of events. Memoirists often place themselves within their family tree, telling something about their familial roots." (15) Authors Tomie dePaola and Patricia Polacco write memoirs that can be read aloud to second grade students as mentor texts for how to write a memoir.

Mentor Texts and Read Aloud

There are several sets of biographies by a common author or publisher that I am going to read to my students or have them read independently or with a partner, throughout this unit. It is a good idea to share biographies with students so they can learn about different people, but also so they can make comparisons between books about the same person or between styles of the same genre. There are three very appropriate sets of books that I have available to me in my classroom and school library, as well as at the public library. (They can also be purchased on amazon.com).

These sets include The Picture Book of (insert name of famous person). These were written and illustrated by David A. Adler and are very engaging to young readers. They have painting-like pictures and a list of important dates related to the person. A little bit longer, but also appropriate for elementary readers is the Who Was ? (insert the name of a famous person before the question mark). These books have various authors, but are written in the same style. They are published by Grosset & Dunlap and an example would be Who Was Albert Einstein? by Jess Brallier. They have large text size and sketched illustrations throughout the book and are organized in chapters which second grade students get excited about because it's a big deal for them to transition from picture books to chapter books. Another series is ValueTales. An example is The Value of Respect: The Story of Abraham Lincoln by Ann Donegan Johnson. ValueTales have different authors for the different stories, but are written in the same style where they tell the life of a famous person and have cartoon images. Each person also has an imaginary friend who acts like their conscience in a way, so there is a fictional element to the stories. There is more advanced vocabulary in these books and therefore I usually use them as a read aloud in order to discuss harder words or unfamiliar ideas.