Heroes of History, Part II

In an earlier post I shared how students used biography picture books to practice summarizing, recognizing opposing viewpoints, and citing textual evidence. Using the four-step process modeled there, students cut to the chase to tell what was "most needed to know" about their famous man or woman from history. So what's next?

Below I've shared some of the biography extensions and report options which students have completed over the years in my classroom. I'm sure you'll find a new one to try out!

Time Machine

As students read their biography, they take the usual notes, either on a prepared outline or free hand. When writing the report, however, the students pretend that they're able to travel back in time to interview this famous person. The most important details are then summarized in a question-answer format which reads in a more interesting way than a standard report. The paragraph students generated in the four-step summary process (above) serves nicely as the interview's introduction.

I've provided a sample of the interview format, but I highly encourage you to have students brainstorm their own interview questions as well. The brainstorming and sequencing process is an excellent introduction to the research process where students will need to formulate inquiries for themselves. Students will also discover that the unique experiences of any given person will in large part dictate the type of questions which should be asked. When reading Who Says Women Can't be Doctors? by Tanya Lee Stone, for example, one of my students was amazed to discover that Elizabeth Blackwell was turned down by twenty-eight different schools in her pursuit of attending medical school. "I think I would have quit trying after the first ten schools said no," the student remarked, and I wondered what Elizabeth Blackwell herself would have said to her in return.

Some years we presented these in a talk show format, with partners playing the role of interviewer, and other years students chose to dress as the person they were portraying. 

Journal

24 Ready to Go Genre Book Reports is a wonderful teacher resource full of ideas for responding to books, and one project from this resource which students have enjoyed is creating a journal.

When I first began teaching, I assigned students a similar journal format, requiring at least three entries that reflected events from the person's childhood or teen years, university or training years, and years of notable achievement. Additional entries could be written at students' discretion.

With the popularity of scrapbooking, students began asking if they could include artifacts in their journals. Projects soon included replica photos, sketches, tickets, maps, currency, and so on. The journal covers likewise became more creative, with students creating covers that resembled television sets, suitcases, trading cards, shipping crates, cars, space shuttles, hats, jerseys, and wanted posters. 

A wonderful set of biography books which rely upon a similar concepts of "snapshots" from a person's life is the 10 Day series by David Colbert, which so far includes books on Anne Frank, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. If all students in your classroom read the same biography or autobiography, they could likewise focus on the ten most pivotal days of that person's life, with students possibly pairing up and writing a first-person account of one of these days.

As mentioned above, the paragraph students generate in the four-step summary process can serve as an introduction to the diary, as the entries themselves may not provide ample information for some readers to understand the importance of the subject's achievements.

Made in Quotes Cover

Lessons Learned

One of my students' favorite parts of the Time Machine assignment (above) is when they, in the guise of their famous person, are asked to give advice to future generations. Putting themselves "into the shoes" of this famous person and distilling the experiences of a lifetime into a bit of sage advice is a difficult yet rewarding task.

In Lessons Learned, students generate eight to ten tips that their hero might pass on to future generations. The advice can be published as beautiful quotes, using a quote making site such as Quozio, Quotes Cover, ReciteThis, or ProQuoter.

Here, the four-step biography summary is used as an introduction piece that acquaints the reader with the giver of wise counsel. The quotes themselves can be printed, or embedded into a Google Slides or similar sharing platform.

Timeline

Since most students best understand a biography in strict chronological order, creating a timeline would be a good way for them to explain and illustrate important life events.

For creating an online timeline, I highly recommend Hstry.co, which I discussed at length in a previous post. Check out that post to see how easy it is to get started with Hstry.

Telescoping Story

Telescopic Text allows writers a chance to share a story just one bit at a time, while revealing small and large thoughts alike in a measured manner. You can best understand this site by checking out the site creator's example. To see how a text is entered and edited, and to see a pretty impressive Telescopic Text created by a seven year-old, check out the video below.



Students could use this site to create a slowly expanding narrative of their hero's life. What's great about the site is that it encourages elaboration, a tough topic to teach students who are often trying to write as little as possible.

Caveat: Students should register for their own accounts and learn the difference between saving and publishing (saving allows for future edits; publishing does not).

Newspaper Clipping

A newspaper clipping describing an important event from a person's life is a terrific way to get students to focus upon what really merits attention. The Fodey Newspaper Generator provides a very short format clipping (about 1000 total characters), which is just enough to provide facts without the clutter of details. The clipping to the right, for example, was created in response to A Nation's Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis, written by Matt De La Peña and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. While the picture book chronicles Louis' rise as a fighter, the newspaper clipping captures just a highlight of that life.


This newspaper generator (which I found at the Learning Never Stops blog) allows for more space and also an image, but fills in the rest of the front page with two nonsense articles. Students would need to screen shot and crop out the other articles if they didn't want them to show.

In addition to a stand-alone activity, the newspaper clipping could also be used as an artifact in the Journal assignment above (some students have also used the movie clapboard generator at the Fodey site for their journal project). 

He Said, She Said 

I previously discussed Google Story Builder in another blog, and I'm still a fan. It's a very neat way to show differing points of view. Take a second to check out my review.  

Here's a short Google Docs Story I created after reading Mary Walker Wears the Pants: The True Story of the Doctor, Reformer, and Civil War Hero, written by Cheryl Harness and illustrated by Carlo Molinari. Note that activist Mary Walker disagrees with what a fabricated nemesis named "Nathan Properbody" has to say.

Students can create both sides of such a fictional dialogue, or two students can take on opposing roles and write from each viewpoint. The process will need some trial and error, and the resulting pieces can't be long, but it's a very different type of writing requiring some critical and creative thinking.

Looking for more tech tools to assess student learning? Be sure to check out this collection of over thirty of the best free sites I've found to assess students at all stages of learning process.

How to Create Interactive Timelines

If you're looking for an awesome online report option for biographies or nonfiction texts, you'll love Hstry.co. Hstry is a site where students can create cool looking, interactive timelines with text, images, videos, and embedded quizzes. 

These are really good looking timelines! If you don't believe me, check out this sample on World War I, or this one about the History of Immigration in theUnited States. And your students can create timelines that look just as good.

In my case, however, I didn't want a timeline. My sixth graders had just read nonfiction books of choice, with topics as varied as fashion, venomous animals, and accidental inventions. I needed a venue that would permit them to show off their topic's most interesting facts. So in my case, my students used the site to create linear collages rather than timelines. The video below (which I created and hosted for free at Screencast-O-Matic) walks you through one of those projects.

I spent a good deal of time modeling the process of creating a Hstry timeline in class (and you'll need to do the same), but some students were still somewhat fuzzy on all the steps even after I finished. Plus, three students were absent the day I modeled the how-to. So I created the following video which walks students through the process. Note: do not make a video when all you have for audio production is a dollar store microphone. The project sheet to which the video refers is here if you care to see it.

One downside to this site is that (at present) students cannot publicly share their projects. So in my class we did mini field trips. Students logged in and set up their projects on their screens. I then randomly distributed our class name cards, and students went and visited the Hstry project belonging to the classmate whose name appeared on the card. While visiting, my students provided feedback via a form I created. After two visits, all students were allowed to return to their projects, read the feedback form, and then make corrections as needed. Following these revisions, we conducted two more staged visits, and then students were permitted to visit as they chose or return to their own laptop to improve their work.

Sample Applications for the Classroom:

• Create a timeline of historical events.
• Create a biographical timeline.
• Embed multiple videos, each with its own quiz.
• Do what my students did, and use it as a linear collage for a nonfiction book.
• Create your own timeline (as a teacher) to provide students with needed historical context they need before a new unit. 

Notes and Caveats:

• Again, student timelines are not publicly visibly (yet), and may never be, so plan accordingly.
• Check-off sheets like the one I created are key to help students manage the content they're adding.
• Looking for other creative, tech-oriented ways to create book reports? Check out these 23 iPad Alternatives to the Book Report.
• No, I did not really read the book about chickens, but I did spend summers running a farm at camp, so I know my way around a chicken coop.

Step Into History!

It seems that in elementary school we focus a majority of our time and efforts on fiction. Although I moved up to sixth grade this year, I've noticed that the fiction focus remains. Is it any wonder, then, that the same students who excel at reading, discussing, and writing about characters, plots, and themes struggle with social studies, science, and math texts?

I think a great way to hook students on nonfiction is to offer them well written, well illustrated picture books that compliment their self-selected reading (often chapter books) and at the same time their content areas of study. One student, for example, became really intrigued by Ancient Greece while studying that unit in social studies. So when I requested topics for a nonfiction book report, he naturally gravitated toward that topic and the dozen nonfiction texts on Ancient Greece in my classroom.

So what's the big deal? The big deal is that the nonfiction picture books (let's call them nonfiction mentor texts), while colorful and inviting, use all the standard conventions of harder nonfiction trade books and textbooks: table of contents, section headings and subheadings, bold vocabulary, text sidebars, diagrams, cutaways and cross-sections, question-answer format, captions, timelines, glossary, and index. In other words, all the critical yet often confusing attributes of a textbook!

Two perfect examples of such texts come from Enslow Publishers: Siege! Can You Capture a Castle? and Conquest! Can You Build a Roman City? Both are illustrated with wide and close views of the historical eras and people they describe, and both contain all of the nonfiction picture book/textbook conventions I listed above. Other titles in the Step Into History series include Hunt! Can You Survive the Stone Age? and Sail! Can You Command a Sea Voyage?

So how can nonfiction picture books be used in the classroom? Let me quote some reviews of the Enslow titles and take it from there.

In reviewing Siege! Can You Capture a Castle? Booklist commented: "This second-person narrative approach creates immediacy and a dramatic context, while never overwhelming the information presented. Readers will learn a good deal about the design of castles, their strengths, and their vulnerability to various weapons and strategies . . . An appealing, informative book for browsing or research."

With this in mind, these texts can be used as "gateway" books which will entice readers to explore concepts in greater detail. While I do have nearly a dozen books on snakes, they vary greatly in their format, depth, and reading levels. An unsuspecting student will get hooked on one of the easier titles, and with a new found interest (and confidence) in the topic, she'll more likely tackle a more difficult text upon completing the first one.

School Library Journal reviewed Hunt! Can You Survive the Stone Age? by saying: "The vibrant color illustrations are exquisitely detailed but never gruesome . . . the texts are reliable and will be useful for report writers."

Nonfiction picture books make great reference tools for research! And these were exactly the texts I had in mind when I assigned my sixth graders a Fabulous Fact Folder project this month. The project was in no way difficult, and that left students free to explore a nonfiction topic which might have been totally new to them. You can download the report format; the three pages pictured get stapled into a manila file folder which in turn is decorated and serves as the report cover.

In reviewing Conquest! Can You Build a Roman City? Library Media Collection stated: "The text and diagrams convey details . . . which could be a means for integrating science or math concepts into a history unit, making the books even more valuable."

Couldn't have said it better myself! I love using historical contexts to integrate math, science, and language. Students really get into the "stories" of history, which makes the related learning extensions not only painless but enjoyable! When recently learning about the Panama Canal, for example, one student asked, "Is this a real story?" He thought I had created the story context just to teach him ten vocabulary words! In the past I've also created math problems using the configurations of Roman legions. Kind of cool when kids realize that a lot of those "math words" such as decades and century have their origins in Latin.

I'll admit I didn't really do the topic justice here; there is so much more that can be done with these texts! I highly recommend the Stenhouse title Nonfiction Mentor Texts: Teaching Informational Writing through Children's Literature, K-8. Tons of great ideas for making the most of nonfiction.

Enslow Publishers is a school publishing company; its success and reputation depend upon delivering quality, factually accurate titles. In addition to the titles I've named they have several hundred more, running a huge range of topics. I'd recommend requesting a catalog and getting some of their books on your next school order.