The Art of Biography

Classroom Activities

The unit should take three weeks time, depending on the pace of your students writing and editing. The goal for the final product is for the student's to have a published book of their life written by themselves as well as by their peers. This way they can keep their reflections of themselves and live up to what they want to be remembered for.

Activity One: Reading and Writing Memoirs (5 to 7 days)

Part A: Defining and Reading a Memoir

Essential Questions:

- Is the author's purpose clearly stated?

- What techniques did the author use to catch the readers' attention?

Objectives:

1. Students will cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text using the SOAPSTone model.

2. Determine the author's purpose for writing the text and analyze the reason certain details were included or excluded

Materials: Post-It Poster Board, sticky notes, highlighters/color pencils in blue, green, yellow, pick, orange, and purple

Vocabulary:

- Autobiography- writing about your entire life

- Memoir- writing about a specific frame of time from your life

Before Reading/Do Now: In their journal, students will write about an event that caused change to happen within our society. Give the students examples such as the invention of iPhone or the iPad or the events on September 11, 2001 to help them brainstorm events.

Direct Instruction: Place the definitions of the terms autobiography and memoir on the board and have students copy them in their notebooks. Explain to students that we are going to read a memoir by Dan Greenburg where he discusses an event that happened in his life that caused him to change. We will use this text as our example for writing our own memoirs about an event that has happened in our lives that created change.

During Reading/ Close Reading # 1: Students will reading Dan Greenburg's personal narrative/memoir "My Super Powers". While reading, the students will work in collaborative groups of 3 to 4 students. Each group will be assigned a role in the SOAPSTone strategy to focus on while reading. As they are reading, they need to highlight the evidence in the text to pertain to their role the specified color.

S- Speaker- Blue

O-Occasion- Green

A - Audience -Pink

P- Purpose-Yellow

S- Subject-Orange

T-Tone - Purple

Students will share what they highlighted with the rest of their group and write their peer's responses/answer in the graphic organizer (appendix B). Recreate a larger form of the graphic organizer on the Post-It Poster Board paper.

Students will also write the evidence of their answer on a sticky note (two to three responses) and place them on the larger Post-It Poster Board by their role.

Once everyone has placed their responses on the poster board, students will nominate a speaker for their group and we will discuss their findings as a whole class.

Close Reading # 2: Students will reread paragraphs 1-3 of "My Superpowers" only. Once they finished they will address the following questions:

- What personal event does Greenburg share with us? What tone is he taking?

- How does the author make you feel reading these three paragraphs?

Close Reading # 3: Students will read "My Superpowers" in its entirety once more than address the following questions.

- Why do you think Greenburg picked this particular event to share?

- What lesson do you think Greenburg wanted to teach his audience?

- How can we use this story to change our actions for the future?

I want students to reflect on Greenburg's writing in discussing what he wanted us to learn from this incident and how can we change our actions by learning from someone else's mistakes. This will help them reflect on how we can learn from our behavior which is what I want them to write about as author's of their own memoirs. I want them to write about an event that caused changed so the embedded purpose is for their audience to learn from what they experienced.

Part B: Reflecting on the Negative: Writing our Own Memoirs

Essential Questions:

- How do we decide what to write in our memoir?

Objectives:

1. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

2. Produce a clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose and audience.

3. With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach

Vocabulary:

- Incident- anindividualoccurrenceorevent.

Students will use Dan Greenburg's memoir as a model to write their own memoir about an incident that brought about change, either in their actions or thinking. Requirements of memoir are as follows:

- The memoir will written as a diary or journal entry

- Will only be one page, front and back in-length.

- Create an interesting title that connects to the narrative being told.

- Incident has to be an event that brought about a significant change

- Has to have a clear beginning, middle and ending

- Author has to reflect in the incident of the event has to be present

The major focus that students have to keep in mind while they are writing is their purpose and what they want their audience to learn. They are trying to teach their audience a lesson through an experience they witnessed so that has to be clearly depicted in their writing. Students will generate a list of events that they are considering writing about in their notebook (at least three events should be listed). After a ten to fifteen brainstorming session, they will discuss their choices with their 3 o'clock partner to help them decide which is the most attention grabbing event or one that will really impact their audience.

Activity 2: Reading and Writing Biographies (5 to 7 days)

Part A: Reading a Biography

Essential Questions:

- What are the five principles of biography writing?

Vocabulary:

- Biography- the story of someone's life as written by someone else

- Five Principles of Biography

Before Reading/Direct Instruction: Define the Five Principles of Writing a Biography in a Power Point Presentation. The five principles are as follows:

1. Identity is Inseparable from History

2. Selecting from Significance

3. Expression Requires Compression

4. Biography as Objectivity

5. Should Be Fair

Have students copy the principles and explanations in their notebook.

During Reading: Close Read # 1 is where students will students will listen to the audio-version of the biography "Matthew Henson on Top of the World" from the McDougal/Holt textbook. While they are listening, students are required to write five different "Thinking Notes" as they listen.

After Reading: Individually, students will complete the worksheet finding the five principles within the biography of Matthew Henson (appendix C) with their 12 o'clock partners. For close read # 2, students will reread pages 102 until page 104. Once they have finished reading, they will address the following question

- What artifacts do you think Jim Haskins had to use to write the life story of Matthew Henson, especially this personal information?

- Zoom In on the events surrounding the beginning of Henson's life. Why do you think the author Jim Haskins decided to share these events?

- How did learning about this aspect of Henson's life make you feel about him?

Close read # 3 students will reread 104 - 105 discussing how Henson becomes educated by interacting with Captain Childs while working on the Katie Hines. They will also look at the passages on the end of 105 and the beginning of 106 discussing Robert Perry's background.

- How did this event create change in Matthew Henson's life?

- Why do you think Haskins included this excerpt about Robert Perry's life if this is Matthew Henson's biography?

Students will re read pgs. 108-109 and answer the following question:

- How does learning about Henson's life and accomplishments change the outlook of ours?

Part B: Writing Biographies of Our Peers

Essential Questions:

- How can we apply the principles of biography to our own writing?

Objectives:

1. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

2. Produce a clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose and audience.

3. With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach

Students will apply what we learned about biographies to write a biography of their peer. They will be paired with their 3 o'clock partner to write each other's biographies. Requirements of the biographies are as follows:

- Biographies are two to four pages (front and back in-length).

- Needs to include the events from the beginning of their life up until now

- Family background information has to be included

- Needs to include the subject's favorite memory growing up (this can include an object such as toy or person) and what this highlights about the subject's personality.

- Need to include the event from the memoir or the diary entry, description of what they learned and what the audience can learn from this person

The author will complete the Questionnaire for Author to Complete for Biography (Appendix D) to gain more background information about their subject. At the subject's discretion, they can offer two artifacts for the author to examine and write in their biography. After the questionnaires were completed and the author has written their first draft, students will work with their 6 o'clock partners for peer editing purposes. Editors will be given a checklist of items to look for in the author's writing (appendix E)

Activity 3: What Do You Want to be Remembered For?

Objectives:

1. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

2. Produce a clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose and audience.

3. With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach

Essential Questions:

- What do you want to be remembered for?

- What actions or events do we want to leave behind that show we were a good person?

State: "Dan Greenburg wished that he had superpowers to help him deal with his real-life bullies. As we know, superpowers such as flying, super-strength and shooting laser beams with our ideas or spider-webs from our arms are actions only found in comic books and works of fiction. However, there are real-life superpowers known as character traits that we can develop to make us better as a person."

Part A: Present the essential questions to the students and provide a copy of the character traits superpowers chart (appendix F). Tell students to pick the one character trait that they want to develop into their new superpower moving forward with their life. Students will use this superpower/character trait to help determine how they want to be remembered by other people as they move forward with their lives. Students also have to predict ways they will use their new superpower/character trait to create positive change. This will be used as the introduction of their biography for when we have them created into a book.

Part B: Working again with their 3 o'clock partner, the students will zoom out to their 60 ^th birthday and reflect on the events they want to see happen in their life. They want to think of events that reflect or demonstrate them using their new 'superpower' in their life to create positive change. Their 3 o'clock partner will write about their person and these actions from a third person point of view as the conclusion to their book. This will only be one page in length to use to end the book.