Kid-created biographies

In this lesson plan, the students will create biographies on the people they know best-- their teachers! The students will use various skills to collect information, organize details, publish the biographies and present the information.

A lesson plan for grades 3–4 Computer/Technology Skills, English Language Arts, and Information Skills

By Gregg Farr, Lynn Beatty, and Tricia Freeze

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Learning outcomes

The students will learn to:

• create a webpage
• write a biography
• take a digital photograph of a person
• upload a digital photo to a website
• interview a person to discover information
• order events in a person’s lifetime
• edit a biography to improve structure and order of the story
• use the five steps of publishing a paper/story

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

5 days

Materials/resources

• paper
• pencil
• clipboard

Technology resources

• Digital Camera
• Computer Lab
• School Website
• Internet Connection
• Netscape Communicator
• tape recorder
• cassette tape
• Microsoft Word or Works

Pre-activities

The students will need to know how to:

• Formulate questions using the 5 W’s
• Use a word processing program
• Create complete sentences
• Use a digital camera
• Work collaboratively
• Edit/Proofread writing

Activities

Day 1

1. Divide class/classes into collaborative groups. (mix ability levels)
2. Ask students to select a teacher or staff member in the school to write about. Encourage students to collectively and mutually decide on a person they will enjoy writing about as a team.
3. Have students browse samples of biographies written about famous people and biographies written by other children.
4. Brainstorm a chart listing the pros and cons of various biographies. The students should analyze the biographies for types of content, timeline order, transition words, and sentence structures.

Day 2

Students will:

1. Brainstorm a set of questions which they would like to ask their school personnel. Encourage students to ask a variety of questions that would complete picture of the life of the person.
2. Compare and contrast their list of questions with one from another group.
3. Set an appointment time to interview their teacher/staff member.
4. Practice interviewing skills with members of their group.

Day 3

Students will:

1. Interview their person. (audio tape the conversation)
2. Take a digital photograph of the person.
3. Debrief after the interview and take notes from the taped conversation.
4. Select direct quotes to use in the biography.

Day 4

Students will:

1. Order the events of the person’s life they are writing about using a brainstorming tool such as a timeline or a past, present, future worksheet.
2. Compose the biography in a word processing document. (Teacher may wish to model an example of a biography prior to the students beginning to write their own. Emphasize transition words and sentence structures.)
3. Edit the biography.

Day 5

1. In the edit mode of Netscape Composer, demonstrate how to copy text from a word document and paste into a web site.
2. Demonstrate how to insert a picture into a web page. Click on Insert, then image, choose graphic file, then click on insert. This method becomes easier if the students have created a folder on the desktop which allows them to store of their graphic and text.
3. Publish the biographies to their school web site using cut and paste.

Assessment

The students should not be graded solely on the end product in this lesson plan. If a true grade is to be taken on this lesson, a rubric (doc | rtf) must be used to assess all the objectives the students learned.