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.

Heroes of History

Read below for Marceau's amazing story!

One popular conversation in education centers around "What is worth knowing?" To that conversation I'd like to add the question, "Who is worth knowing?"

When I ask students to name someone famous and the first reply I hear is "Kim Kardashian," I die just a little bit inside. Students don't seem to have an understanding of, or appreciation for, the lives of great men and women who changed the course of history. 

But biography picture books can help to remedy that.

Wiser Words Were Never Spoken

My high school daughter recently took her SAT and was describing the writing prompt she was given. She paraphrased the quote and named the speaker (which I won't reveal here), and then described for me the way in which she had crafted her response. 

I finally asked, "And did you include why that quote was so important, considering the person who said it?" 

Her reply: "Well, I had heard of him, but I didn't really know who he was." 

Opportunity lost.

Regardless of what some might have us believe (the PARCC assessment comes to mind), historical context does, in fact, matter when examining any piece of text, and history is the product of those who made it.

Students therefore need knowledge of heroes of history.

Getting Started

Before showing students even a single biography, I gave them some practice summarizing current events articles from Tween Tribune using the tried and true 5Ws and 1H. This required a significant shift in students' responses; after all, I had been encouraging them for months to elaborate, and now they were being asked to summarize an entire article in a single sentence. 

The Tween Tribune article "It's Even Too Cold for Polar Bears!", for example, was summed up as follows:

Due to her specialized diet designed to eliminate a thick layer of insulating fat, Lincoln Park Zoo's resident polar bear Anana had to be moved indoors last Monday during Chicago's record-low temperatures.

Note that in addition to the basic facts, the sentence also provides students with a model for writing a cause/effect relationship.

After some independent practice with longer articles (requiring even greater ability to discern important facts), we were ready to move on to trade books. 

You may want to follow along on the assignment guidesheet which you're welcome to download in pdf (or Word) and be sure to grab the blank sheet as well (also available as a Word doc). You'll notice that the instructional steps below differ somewhat from those given to students for their own work.

Just the Facts

 

For my mentor text, I selected Robert Burleigh's George Bellows: Painter with a Punch!, in part because while George Bellows' art might be familiar to students, the man as an artist was not. I also planned to return to this text in a later lesson on using opposing viewpoints to construct argumentative writing.

In their notebooks, students jotted down a list of the 5Ws and 1H (Who, What, Where, When, Why, How) and were asked to listen for those facts as I read the book aloud. I read the majority of the book, stopping to monitor understanding and also to ask if any of our facts had been discovered.

By story's end we had 

Who: George Bellows
What: painted pictures that weren't beautiful
Where: New York City
When: early 1900s
Why: to show emotions and power
How: showing scenes of everyday city life

Cobbled together after some discussion and experimentation, these facts became a fact-fixing sentence that sounded like this:

In the early 1900s, George Bellows and other artists in New York City’s Trashcan School began painting pictures that showed the ugly, gritty, common scenes of the city in order to capture the emotion and power of everyday life.

Prove It!

Students knew that this was coming. What textual evidence backed up what we just stated? We found several sentences which might work, and finally settled on just a snippet of one quote, which we placed into a sentence that included both the author and book:

According to author Robert Burleigh in the book George Bellows: Painter with a Punch, Bellows thought scenes of everyday life were beautiful and was “determined to find them.”

So What?

But then I asked, "So what? Why did that matter?" And here's where students begin to see the light. Those people from history who changed the way others think, believe, or act tend to be those worth remembering. In the case of George Bellows, he and other students of Robert Henri went against the traditional belief that the artist's role was to paint what was beautiful. 

This led us to construct an opposing viewpoint statement to precede the summary sentence we had already drafted:

For centuries, most people believed that artists should focus upon what is beautiful and romantic, but one artist named George Bellows thought differently.

Legacy

This, naturally, led to the question of legacy. "What lasting impact did this person's life and work have upon us? Why should they be remembered today?"

I had to provide a bit of background here, discussing with students that at this time in history, many schools of art were wrestling with the role of the artist and the artist's responsibility to represent "real life." Eventually we came up with this closing sentence:

Artists of the Ashcan School helped others to explore "bold new worlds" while at the same time recording, in full color, what New York City looked like one hundred years ago.

Pieced together, the finished summary read as follows:

For centuries, most people believed that artists should focus upon what is beautiful and romantic, but one artist named George Bellows thought differently. In the early 1900s, George Bellows and other artists in New York City’s Trashcan School began painting pictures that showed the ugly, gritty, common scenes of the city in order to capture the emotion and power of everyday life. According to author Robert Burleigh in the book George Bellows: Painter with a Punch, Bellows thought scenes of everyday life were beautiful and was “determined to find them.” Artists of the Ashcan School helped others to explore "bold new worlds" while at the same time recording, in full color, what New York City looked like one hundred years ago.

An impressive summary once completed. But, could students could do it on their own?

Training Wheels

Armed with this model, students jotted down the sentence order in their notebooks as a quick reference:

I. Opposing Viewpoint 
II. 5Ws and 1H
III. Textual Evidence
IV. Legacy

Each student was then assigned a picture book biography from numerous examples chosen by the teacher. Some teachers might be surprised that students aren't allowed at this point to choose their own books, but I feel it's important that students approach the exercise with no preconceived notions about the person they're studying.

Students read the books for homework and completed the four step process outlined on the guidesheet. The following day they shared their first attempt with a classmate and made revisions based on that peer's feedback. I then had students switch books with any other student in the class apart from the one who had heard their summary. This guaranteed that by day three, two students would have read each book and could get together to compare paragraphs. This sharing led to much more productive revisions, as both students had intimate knowledge of the text and could offer more specific feedback on not only form, but also content.

I was surprised by students' success with the process. While some, as expected, followed the Bellows model precisely, simply swapping out details as needed, others departed from the model. A couple of students tried switching sentence orders when writing summaries of their second books, while others tried different grammatical structures while maintaining the sentence order we had established.

One student, not thrilled when handed Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime, was amazed to learn that this entertainer played a major role in the French Resistance, and led many Jewish children to safety. His paragraph, which he knew fell far short of paying homage to this unsung hero, reads:

Many people might think that miming is a fairly recent type of drama, but it is actually an ancient form of art that, because of sound movies, might have been forgotten; however, a talented young Frenchman named Marcel Marceau revived its popularity. After serving bravely in the Resistance against the Nazis during World War II, Marceau followed his dream of becoming an actor capable of moving the audience to laughter or tears, all without saying a word. According to author Gloria Spielman in Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime, "By the time he died in 2007, Marcel had revived the ancient and almost forgotten art of silence." Because of Marceau's work, many performers who followed in his footsteps realize that it isn't what you say, but how your facial expressions and body gestures convey it.

Most surprising to many students was how much they enjoyed reading about people they had never even heard of (many students had already made plans for the next book they wanted to read). The skepticism I witnessed on the first day when distributing books was replaced with enthusiasm by day two of the assignment. And since then, students have been asking to do the assignment again, and many have naturally been begging to read biographies of their own choosing.

So What's Next?

While this lesson can certainly stand alone as an exercise in summarizing, I can see these simple summary paragraphs serving as introductions to other types of responses to biography, current events, and history.

In my next post I'll share some possible extension activities, as well as some of the more popular titles which students enjoyed.

We've Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children's March

"I want to go to jail," (third grader) Audrey told her mother.

Since Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks thought that was a good idea, they helped her get ready.

Cynthia Levinson's stunning and moving We've Got a Job chronicles the days leading up to the 1963 Birmingham Children's March. Read on to discover more about this historic event (and how you can win a copy of this book for your very own classroom).

In We've Got a Job, readers learn how young protestors, some just grammar school students, took to the streets in May of 1963 with the intention of filling the jails so that the segregationist policies of the South's most notoriously divided and violent city could no longer be carried out. For years Birmingham had seen vicious attacks on blacks, including countless fires and bombings, so many that the city was bitterly nicknamed "Bombingham" by its black residents. 

Too often, however, those of us who view history as an ordered series of dates in a textbook see the events of Birmingham as a given, as a struggle which was destined to take place. Little do most of us know how close the Birmingham protests came to utterly failing.

While many adults participated in sit-ins, marches, and public prayer meetings, it soon became apparent that retributions by whites, mostly through job loss, threatened to snuff the small flames of freedom before they ever caught. But encouraged by Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, and others, children accepted the challenge and risked their own freedom and safety to do what had to be done. Facing the threats of dogs, high pressure fire hoses, and crowd brutality, children took a stand for those freedoms for which they can no longer wait.

Told through the eyes and voices of those who participated, this book brings a sense of intimacy and urgency which is often lacking in textbook accounts. Cynthia Levinson mixes personal narratives, historical background, contemporary anecdotes, and headlines of the time to create a well-rounded, highly readable account of extraordinary heroism by ordinary folk.

The Chain of Hate

Martin Luther King wrote:

"To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify hate in the world... Someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives."

And perhaps this defined the greatest challenge for the marchers: meeting hatred with love, violence with nonviolence, ignorance with understanding, intolerance with patience. What Levinson helps the reader to see is that the two sides weren't clearly cut; many whites sympathized with and supported the black cause, and many blacks disagreed with the nonviolent measures of the leaders of the protest movement.

One excerpt from Chapter Eight: May 2. D-Day describes the excitement of the children as they're carted off to jail in buses after they've filled all the police paddy wagons:

The kids were exhilarated; the policemen were exhausted. An officer asked a marcher, "When is this going to end?" 

She responded, "Do we have our freedom yet?"

"I wish you could have your freedom just to stop this," he admitted.

Later, at mass meeting in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, King reassured hundreds of worried parents by saying:

"Your daughters and sons are in jail... Don't worry about them. They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation."

The book concludes with an Author's Note, a map of the city, and a timeline of the events described in the book. These documents, as well as the book's final chapter, will help teachers answer the many questions that students might have about the Birmingham Children's March, and its outcomes on history.


Extensions and Recommended Resources:

• One key to strong informational writing is the ability to blend exposition and narrative in a way that provides readers with information, while at the same time encouraging the reader to read on. Cynthia Levinson makes this happen through wonderful transitional phrases, the inclusion of headings, and a well-researched collection of quotes from the very people who lived the events. Many excerpts from this text could provide wonderful models for students to use in their own writing.
• A study of Martin Luther King, Jr. would benefit greatly from this book, as it helps readers to see him as a very embattled, very conflicted, and very human figure. In the rear view mirror of history, we tend to see only the accomplishments and greatness of our heroes, and rarely their struggles. Students will be interested to learn that King faced disappointment, criticism, and failure; much of his greatness was his refusal to be defined or consumed by those same failings.
• Peachtree Publishers has created a wonderful companion site featuring a synopsis, resources, and additional information about the players mentioned in the book. Also, be sure to check out the Official Blog Tour for this book. Every blogger has their own take, and lots more resources as well.
• The Greensboro Sit-Ins are mentioned as an inspiration for the nonviolent restaurant sit-ins which took place in Birmingham. I've collected some wonderful picture book recommendations as well as several resource sites in a post titled Sit Down and Be Counted: Exploring the Civil Rights Movement with Picture Books.
• 
  If you're looking for a teacher reference, or a book appropriate for readers in grades 6 and up, I can recommend none more highly than A Dream of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. Well organized by year and event, with plenty of period photographs, this is the book that will help you answer all of your students questions (and your own!) about this tumultuous and important time in our nation's history Author Diane McWhorter provides fact in a beautiful tapestry that reads like a story, full of real-life human beings whose individual stories form the larger transformation that we call The Civil Rights Movement.

Holocaust Picture Books: An Annotated List

After many requests, I've finished compiling an annotated list of Holocaust books. I resisted the urge to categorize them by grade level, as I feel they can be used effectively in both upper elementary and middle grades.

First, however, I wanted to make special mention of one of the newer Holocaust picture books available. Irena's Jars of Secrets by Marcia Vaughan, illustrated by Ron Mazellan, is a wonderful and important addition to the canon of children's literature on the Holocaust (see the full list below), and certainly one worth adding to your own library.

In Irena's Jars of Secrets, Irena Sendler learns compassion at an early age from her father, a Catholic physician who treated Jewish patients at a time when most Christian doctors would not.When her father contracts typhus treating these same patients, he tells Irena on his death bed to "help someone who is drowning, even if you cannot swim."

Irena takes this advice to heart, and begins administering to the Jews imprisoned within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto by occupying Nazi forces. Beginning in 1940 and continuing for the next two years, Irena smuggles in food, clothing, and medicine. She realizes, however, that this isn't enough. As the Nazis begin transporting the Ghetto inhabitants to concentration camps, Irena joins a secret organization called Zegota, and makes plans to smuggle Jewish children to safety.

But what parent will give up their child? Only after Irena swears to provide new identities and preserve the real names of their children do the Jewish parents reluctantly release them to her. The book chronicles the close calls of the smuggling operation, as well as the capture and near execution of Irena.

After the war's end, Irena unearths her buried jars which contain the real identities of the children that were saved. Most of the children's parents have been killed in the camps, but the lists allow the Jewish National Committee to locate living relatives for many of the children. An afterword provides additional information about Irena Sendler, who never considered herself a hero. Instead, she said this in a letter to the Polish Senate in 2007:

Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.

Rich, wonderful paintings by Ron Mazellan (who also illustrated the Holocaust title The Harmonica) help to capture both the tragic and triumphant moments of this book. His subjects and scenes are dramatically lit, and in his own words "moody and mysterious," putting the absolute perfect finishing touches on this title.

Extensions:

• Why are names so important? Ask students to interview their parents and find out how their names came to be. 
• Pair Irena's Jars of Secrets with Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto. What information do both books share? What information is provided by one book but not the other? Why might we want to consult multiple sources when conducting research?
• Check out Discussing Historical Fiction and the Definition of Courage with Marcia Vaughan and Ron Mazellan at Lee and Low's website. Both creators discuss how this topic relates to their own experiences, and the processes they underwent to bring this story to life.
• At this same site you'll also find some wonderful discussion questions in Lee and Low's collection of Teacher's Guides. 
• For this particular picture book, as well as any that mentions the Warsaw Ghetto, I'd recommend Children in the Ghetto, an interactive site which describes itself as

  "...A website about children, written for children. It portrays life during the Holocaust from the viewpoint of children who lived in the ghetto, while attempting to make the complex experience of life in the ghetto as accessible as possible to today’s children.
  
  Along with the description of the hardships of ghetto life, it also presents the courage, steadfastness and creativity involved in the children’s lives. One of the most important messages to be learned is that despite the hardships, there were those who struggled to maintain humanitarian and philanthropic values, care for one another, and continue a cultural and spiritual life."

  By examining artifacts, writings, and first hand interviews, students gain an understanding of the "anything-to-survive" mentality which the ghetto created and demanded of its inhabitants. Students can either explore freely, taking advantage of the interactive elements, or additionally respond in writing using the printable handouts. I chose to download the handouts, available in Word format, and tweaked them according to my students' strengths and needs..
  
  Once they've completed this exercise, students will have a mental bank of sites, sounds, stories, and symbols from which to draw upon, greatly increasing their understanding of this period in history.

Annotated List of Holocaust Picture Books

Embedded below you'll find an annotated list of Holocaust Picture Books.Using the provided controls, you can share, download, print, or enlarge this pdf. I hope you'll find this useful when searching out the best books for your own studies. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know which books I missed!

 

Are the Dinosaurs Dead, Dad? and Other Prehistoric Picture Books

In Are the Dinosaurs Dead, Dad? young Dave's uneventful trip to the museum takes an unlikely and entertaining twist. From the book's inside flap:

Dad takes Dave to the museum to see the dinosaurs. Dad is sure he knows all there is to know about these amazing creatures. But soon Dave gets the feeling that Dad has one hugely important fact very, very wrong.

Because, you see, as Dad and Davey pass each dino, the dino seems to come to life!

This is one of those terrific books that relies upon dramatic irony via the illustrations, because Julie Middleton's text doesn't let on to what's happening. Young readers, however, can certainly see for themselves that toes, tails, and terrible jaws are moving! During a read-aloud, a "knowing" adult will wisely avoid  being in on the joke, as children love to scream and point out the "secrets" that adults (because of their advanced age and failing eyesight) apparently don't notice for themselves.

Artist Russell Ayto's whimsical images are half the fun, showing us giant-headed monsters balanced on impossibly tiny legs. The creatures' equally understated, overstated, and improbably body part dimensions are fun to discuss as well. The format is large, with plenty of open space on each spreads that lends credibility to the size of the space and the dinosaurs themselves.

Below you'll find some terrific companion books with activity extensions that could work equally well with Are the Dinosaurs Dead, Dad? In addition to being mistaken about dinos, some adults are also mistaken in thinking you can ever have enough dinosaur books!

Cretaceous Companions

For the younger set, Harry and the Dinosaurs Go to School by Ian Whybrow is a wonderful combination of a dino book and a first-day-of-school-jitters book. Harry's toy dinos help him makes new friends, and even assist another shy boy in acclimating to his new surroundings. Adrian Reynolds' bright and sunny illustrations are perfect for sharing and discussing during read-alouds. Check out other titles in this series including Harry and the Dinosaurs Say, "Raahh!" and Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs.

Extensions:

• Students can bring in one of their own "prized possessions" and discuss what makes it special. 
• Students might want to create their own simple paper plate dinosaurs, which can be displayed with a colorful bucket on the bulletin board. 
• Students could imagine that they have a real, live dinosaur for a pet. How would that work? How would you feed him? Where would he sleep?
• Looking for a fun and easy cooking project? Check out these fossil cookies.

Marvelous, Monstrous Models

The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley with illustrations by Brian Selznick ("many of which are based on the original sketches of Mr. Hawkins"). Working with scientist Richard Owens, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins wanted to create such perfect models of dinosaurs that anyone who gazed at his creations would see into the past. By using just the bits and pieces of fossils, bones, and teeth that had been found by early palaeontologists, Waterhouse filled in "gaps" by thinking of existing animals which the dinosaurs might have resembled. This book chronicles his triumphal premiere in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Park (when tens of thousands of spectators, including the Queen, gaped in wonder at his creatures), as well as his tragedy in Central Park (when vandals under the vindictive order of Boss Tweed destroyed his dinosaurs destined for the Americans). Although we now realize that many of Waterhouse's guesses were somewhat inaccurate, no one can dispute his ability to light the imaginations of the thousands who viewed his works.

For more explorations into what we've learned about dinosaurs since the earliest days of their discovery, check out Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs by Kathleen Kudlinksi and S.D.Schindler.A terrific book for helping students understand that science never rests!

Extensions:

• Students can use clay to design their own dinosaurs. They don't need to sculpt one specific, real-life dino; instead, they should simply use their imaginations to create an original prehistoric monster. Since scientist continue to discover new dinosaurs all the time, who's to say what the next dino discovery might look like?
• Students might also enjoy building their own prehistoric pasta pets. Show students pictures of assembled dino skeletons in museums. Explain that while these models take many years to collect, piece together, and display, today students will create their own models using pasta as bones. Given a wide variety of different pasta shapes, students can assemble their own dinos by gluing their selected noodles to black construction paper. Once partially dry, the pasta will need a second coat to affix it well to the paper. 
• For a look at how those dinosaurs get to the museum, check out the book (coincidentally called) How the Dinosaur Got to the Museum by Jessie Hartland. This book explains how dinosaur bones go from the earth to you, the museum visitor, via fourteen other people, who are named and collected in a House-that-Jack-Built type progression.

Bold and Beautiful

A wonderful abecedarium can be discovered in An Alphabet of Dinosaurs by Peter Dodson, with paintings by Wayne D. Barlowe. Familiar favorites mix with newcomer neighbors on full spreads that features two text sections (one for emerging readers and another for fluent readers) and a full color illustration. The vivid and uniquely imagined colors and patterns of these dinos is what caught my eye when I first viewed this book. In the books' introduction we read: "The paintings in this book show the dinosaurs as we now think of them. Gone is the image of slow-moving giants. Gone is the picture of tail-dragging lizards. Instead, we see vibrant, active dinosaurs living in a world filled with brightly colored animals and plants.

Extensions: 

• Taking a cue from this book, students can create their own unique dino patterns on simple coloring sheets. They can either color with vivid colors (danger! stay back!, bold colors (look at me!), muted colors (I need to hide), or patterns which create camouflage (to avoid being seen by prey or predator).
• Older students can be given a simple white dino silhouette (shape) and a variety of a magazine from which to choose pictures. After choosing a large picture which can serve as a background, students will color in their dino shape to camouflage into the background.

Dino for a Day

In Jim Murphy's Dinosaur for a Day, older readers can explore a typical day in the life of a Hypsilophodon, a 90 pound herd animal that depended upon its wits and its companions for survival. Additional information from the author precedes and follows this din's "biography," providing for a complete profile of one specific creature. Mark Alan Weatherby's gorgeous paintings put us at dinosaur's-eye view with our surroundings, a perspective rarely seen in other dino books.

Extensions:

• Have each student choose a dinosaur, and write about "a day in the life of..." Students may need to do some research on which dinosaurs lived in which period, and many students may discover that their dinos and their friends' dinos might have shared the same habitats!
• Instead of a dinosaur, have students choose any other animal (or use an animal they've already researched). Require that students illustrate their "daily routine" with view that would be seen from their critter's perspective.
• Create dino fossils in the classroom.

Modern Monsters

What if dinosaurs were alive today? How would our daily lives be different? In If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today, author Dougal Dixon answers that question with frightening predictions of predatory sea creatures that hunt sperm whales, and tyrannosaurs that terrorize longhorns. The photo-realistic illustrations are amazing as they juxtapose the prehistoric past with the present.

Can you picture yourself flying in a jet across peaceful skies, and suddenly seeing a Quetzalcoatlus, a pterosaur with the wingspan exceeding a small airplane? Can you imagine seeing your trashcan tipped over at the curb, not by a raccoon or even a coyote, but a scavenging carnivorous dino called Coelophysis? Students will love the retouched photos, so disturbingly realistic that one might begin to wonder, "What are the chances of the dinosaurs coming back?"

Extensions:

• Challenge students to draw dinosaurs in modern day settings. How would their traits and habits affect their interactions with people?
• Challenge students to put dinos to work. If they existed today, how could their size and strength be helpful to humans?

Wordless Wonders

Two clever books that tell neat dino tales are Time Flies by Eric Rohmann and Chalk by Bill Thomson.

Extensions:

• The wordless format of both books offers the perfect opportunity for students to tell their own stories. Students can "write" similar books as a group, and tell their own stories.
• Students might also be challenged to write the tales they "see" using poetry rather than prose.

How Do Dinosaurs...

From Jane Yolen and Mark Teague come the fantastic series of How Do Dinosaurs... books including How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon? and How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? Kids will love all the dinos that Mark Teague includes, and they'll also appreciate the funny and fun-to-recite rhymes of Jane Yolen.

Extension:

• Brainstorm a How to... problem with the class and write a similar story as a group, or challenge pairs or teams to come up with their own ideas (focusing on social skills seems to work well here).