Searching for excellent biographies for kids

I am searching for excellent biographies written for upper-elementary age children. I seem to have many examples of less than excellent biographies. I'm hoping readers of this post will offer some suggestions.

I would like to find this type of biography to use both as mentor texts and for research purposes. One of the writing projects our 4th graders do is a research project on a subject related to the American Revolution. Many of the students choose to research a person and write a biography. Over the years as I have read more biographies written for adult readers, I realize the limitations of many of the children's biographies about those same people. Some are not accurate, or not complete. Some are just not terribly interesting to read.

I am a fan of the blog Two Writing Teachers, and when I read this post on "Teaching Authentic Information Writing," I realized the ideas applied to writing for children, as well as teaching children to write. The post is about a presentation by author Ralph Fletcher, on how to help young writers find the story in their nonfiction topics to create lively written work with a personal voice and without getting trapped into reciting a list of facts. This is exactly the type of writing that many authors of new biographies and books about history, such as David McCullough's and David Hackett Fischer, to name just two, are writing now. They are fun to read, as opposed to what I remember from when I was in school.

In our research project, we require each student to read at least two sources on his/her topic. One source is usually a below grade level book that can be read quickly to get an overview of the person's life. I like the books of David Adler (A Picture Book of...) for this part of the research. The second source is usually a chapter book. The purposes of the second book are to find more details and to learn about the importance of using more than one source. It's always interesting when students find discrepancies between sources and need to decide how to handle them.

I am therefore looking for strong examples of biographies for younger readers. I collect books about the American Revolution for this project, but I would love to have excellent biographies for my class library a to use as mentor texts and to inspire my students to read more nonfiction. If you know of biographies that fit my description, please leave a comment giving the title and author. Thank you in advance!

Blogging: the Beginning

My 4th graders are enjoying their first forays into blogging. We began with several lessons on Internet safety and citizenship from Commonsense Media, followed by taking a quick look at some existing blogs to give students a visual image of how a blog might look with the template background. We then moved to creating the first posts on paper. I assigned the first topic, which was favorite foods, thinking that everyone likes food. And everyone did have a favorite food, from ribs to tofu, which they wrote about.

Next, we discussed commenting. My guidelines are that comments need to be positive, related to the post and written in complete sentences, with capitals and punctuation. For the paper blogs we used post-its to stick comments onto the posts. Here is the bulletin board my partner teacher made with the paper blogs her class created:

Moving onto the Kidblog site, I had my students type up their favorite food posts onto their blogs. Most of their posts were not very long, which judging from last year, is typical for the beginning of the school year. After typing and publishing their posts, students read and commented on their classmates' posts and uploaded avatars for themselves.

Now we will be blogging each week in class. The students can also access their blogs from home and I encourage them to finish posts at home, as well as read each others' posts, comment, and start new posts on whatever they would like to write about. It's working! One of my students just published a post, about an experience he had, less than an hour ago. Each week I offer a "challenge post," which is just a prompt, but the children are only required to take a challenge once a month. If they have other topics they want to write about, I'm delighted to let them do that! The challenges are a help with those students who can't get started and also with ensuring that at least once a month everyone writes about a topic with some substance. The first challenge was to write about a favorite book and explain what you liked about it.

I attended a session at a tech workshop this fall on blogging in school. I was impressed to see how many different ways teachers were using blogs in the classroom, but the main idea I took away from the session was the importance of teachers blogging along with their students. The presenter showed with real examples that when a teacher writes a blog of several paragraphs, students will model their writing on that, sometimes even borrowing some of the language. On the other hand, teachers who only wrote a sentence, giving the topic that students should write about, students wrote very brief responses. One the things I will be doing differently this year is to blog each week, writing in response to my challenge.

Blogging with Students

Last year I blogged with my students for the first time. Blogging is a wonderful adjunct to writer's workshop where students can write about topics they choose themselves in a supportive community of their fellow students.

I decided to try blogging with my class after attending the ICE conference in 2013 and going to a how-to session on this topic given by Pernille Ripp. She presented a step-by-step organized plan, beginning with an initial blog on paper. Internet safety, tagging, commenting, including parents, and opening up to connecting with other classes were discussed. Pernille also said she doesn't grade her students's blogs. She encourages them to come up with their own topics, but also offers a weekly challenge topic.

I was excited about trying student blogging as a way to develop student enjoyment of writing, as well as their growth as writers. I also saw blogging as a way to practice digital citizenship and safety, and as a window into our classroom for parents. On the other hand, I had some concerns about beginning this project. Where would I fit it in? Like all teachers everywhere, my school day is packed. I was also worried about how parents would feel about their children blogging, especially the safety factor. Our technology educator Vinnie Vrotny, encouraged me to give blogging a place in 4th grade, but also to take the time to plan before starting. This I did, using the information from the ICE session as well as online sources noted below.

I decided to sign up with kidblog.org. Though there are a number of sites specifically for blogging with younger children, kidblog was recommended by Pernille Ripp and it is easy to use. For the digital citizenship part of blogging, I chose to use the online lessons available from Commonsense Media. I attended one of their workshops and my grade level partner and I had already been using the lessons for our grade level. I decided to use 30 minutes per week of language arts time for blogging.

I introduced blogging by showing the class several examples of real blogs for students to get a visual of what a blog might look like. Then they designed their own blogs on paper and wrote a sample post on their favorite foods. A lesson on paper blogging can be found here. Several weeks later, after digital citizenship lessons and planning on paper, students began their kidblogs.

Blogging was very popular. At the beginning, many students spent a lot of their time finding images, both as their identity and as their posts, but most began writing short posts within a week or so. I wanted to leave blogging fairly open as an assignment, but I did offer a weekly challenge, which was a topic suggestion or a question. I asked that they take at least one challenge a month as a topic. I soon found that I had to make a few more rules:

• Posts must have a topic. This led to better paragraph writing. 
• No more than three exclamation or question marks can be used in a row. 
• No begging for comments from others.
• A comment must be a complete sentence with substance. If you write "Cool!!!" you must follow up with more.

After my students were comfortable with writing posts and comments, I opened up the blog to parents, who could read and comment, but not join as bloggers. I had only a few parents leave comments, but all were positive. Before introducing blogging to my students, I explained the idea in detail to parents through my newsletter. None of my parents expressed concerns about blogging.

Later in the year, I read the students' blogs from the first post to the most recent and I was amazed at the growth in writing. From the beginning posts where many of the kids focused on posting visuals, they grew into the idea of sharing their thoughts in a fairly organized way. They also developed a positive community through reading and leaving comments for each other, supporting others' ideas and adding their own. I see student blogging now as an important aspect of writers' workshop, not an add-on. 

I plan to repeat this blogging journey in the 2014-15 school year and expand by connecting with other blogging classes. Two sites to help with connections are Comments4kids and QuadBlogging. 

Happy blogging!