How to Write a Biography Lesson Plan
Writing a biography can be an intriguing activity for kids if they approach the writing assignment in the spirit of a mystery. Finding out someone's life story and thinking about what early events affected an individual's life is an interesting challenge. Along the way, learning to organize their research materials and to prioritize what they discover are valuable skills that students will use in many other forms of writing, as well as biographies.
Instructions
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How to Write a Biography Lesson Plan
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Challenge students to choose individuals for the subject of their biographies by finding people who interest them but who they don't already know a lot about. Suggest they start by selecting a field such as sports, entertainment, politics, science, art or business and looking for a someone who has accomplished or achieved something they admire.
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Ask students to write interview questions This step is crucial to making sure that students adequately cover their subjects' lives; in addition, it will help avoid kids' temptations to just copy material. Have students pretend they were actually meeting their subjects and to consider what they might ask. Get them started by brainstorming together as a class. Not every question you come up with will work for all their subjects, but it will send them in the right direction. Give example questions such as the following: "What made you decide to become a scientist?" or "How did your parents feel about what you decided to do with your life?"
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Explain to students what kinds of sources you will allow them to use for their research. Depending on the age of your students, you may restrict students to materials in the school library, including encyclopedia entries. For older students, you may allow certain selected computer sites but restrict the use of certain sites. You may also want to restrict the number of sources; for younger kids, using too many sources becomes confusing.
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Allow time for students to find the answers to their interview questions. Suggest that they may not be able to find answers to everything they wanted to know; however, finding 20 answers will probably suffice. Before they begin writing, in addition to their questions, students should have a "Five W's" sheet: Who is the person (name)?, What did the person do (field of work)?, When did the person live?, Where did the person live? and Why is this person notable?
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Help students organize the research they have conducted. You might want to have them use colored pencils to mark like areas. For example, everything about the person's childhood could be marked in green, everything about the person's personal life could be marked in red and information about the individual's professional life could be marked in blue. However, they may want to organize their biographies in other ways. For example, they might want to simply talk about several different areas of achievement or major discoveries.
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Have students write a rough draft of their biographies, encouraging them to include an introduction with some basic information from their "Five W" sheets as well as a topic sentence for each paragraph or section of their papers. Create an opportunity for some peer review: Let students read each other's papers and make comments about what information they think might be missing or might be too long before writing the final draft of the biography.
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Tips & Warnings
Give students an opportunity to write biographies of each other as a warm-up activity.
