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Life Stories
By Elizabeth Swartz
Reading and writing biographies and autobiographies can lead students to a better understanding of perspective and contrast in writing
For the printable click here. 
PDF 139KB
Biographies and autobiographies are available in many newspapers and magazines. I like to begin working with my students by reading a biography aloud and then comparing the life we just read about to our own lives. While there are always cultural, geographical and socio-economic differences, it's often amazing to note the similarities. Athletes and rock stars who experienced a single-parent home or difficulties in school make a strong role model for students with the same challenges.
Talk to your librarian about this unit and ask to have the children introduced to the biography section of the library. Each child can read and report on a biography of choice. Discuss how biographies often follow a timeline format, keeping lives chronologically correct. Students can make a timeline to fill in as they read along.
Learning about lives. Pairs of students can interview each other and write biographies. Is there a theme that runs through the story, like always having had a certain type of pet or hobby? Help students take photos of one another to include in the final biographies that can be printed in the computer lab and spiral bound.
Send your partnered students out to interview and write a biography of someone else in the school or community. You might want to include people in various careers in order to do some cross-curricular work with this unit.
Writing your story. Compare biographies and autobiographies using a Venn diagram. What's the big difference that comes from changing the point of view?
Continue the unit with autobiographies that students illustrate with current and old photos of themselves. Compare and contrast the autobiography with the biography that had been written earlier. Demonstrate how it often takes both to get a full picture of an individual.
Send your students back to the library to find autobiographies about the people whose biographies they'd read earlier. Compare and contrast the information found in the two books. Do your students prefer one to the other?
The quotable life. Look in newspapers and magazines or online for biographies and autobiographies. Create a bulletin board on which students can post excerpts or quotes from the articles they find. The reproducible page can help students record what they find and where they find it. The extent of the bibliographic information that you require will depend on your students' abilities, but even recording basic information will be good practice for the future, as your students continue living their life stories.
IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts #1:
Students read a wide range of texts to build an understanding of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world.
IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts #7:
Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions.
IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts #12:
Students use written language for the exchange of information, and to accomplish their own purposes.
For the printable click here. PDF 139KB
Elizabeth Swartz is librarian at Watsontown Elementary School and Turbotville Elementary School in PA.
February, 2004, Vol.34, No.5
