Teaching biography genre study

Other Posts in This Series:

Post 1: The Setup

Post 2: A Foundation with Reading Strategies

Post 3: Mysteries

Post 4: Informational Texts

Post 5: Biographies
Post 6: Poetry
Post 7: Fables

While we're learning about non-fiction texts, we delve right into biographies after informational.  Because it's another non-fiction study, it looks very similar to the informational study, in that, I let my students' interests drive their reading.

To begin this unit, I ask students a question - "How does a person become famous?"  or "What makes someone famous?"

They have lots of ideas!  Again, I give them a post-it and they write their answer on this.  I collect them and share them aloud as we sort them onto chart paper.  At the end, we have an Affinity Diagram of reasons why people are famous.


You can see from this chart, that most students think are thinking of athletes or musicians as famous people.  We talk about people we know from each section