Biographies can be a great resource to use in your upper elementary classroom. Whether you are using them in reading, history, or science, using biographies in upper elementary can be beneficial to your students.
Biographies written for children have changed over the years. Today, there are many wonderfully written and illustrated biographies that children will love and enjoy that are excellent to use in your classroom, and there are several reasons why incorporating biographies into your lessons can be beneficial. Read on to find seven great reasons for using biographies in your upper elementary classroom.
Why Using Biographies in Upper Elementary Can Be Beneficial
Enhance Literacy Skills
Biographies offer rich, diverse narratives that challenge students to engage with a complex text. Reading biographies can help expose students to a variety of writing styles and rich vocabulary.
Foster Empathy and Understanding
Exploring the lives of different individuals helps students connect with the challenges, achievements, and hardships faced by historical and/or famous figures. Students can often relate these experiences to their own lives to foster a sense of compassion and understanding.
Inspire Motivation and Resilience
Biographies often highlight the struggles faced by individuals and the obstacles they overcame to achieve success. Biographies can serve as powerful motivators, inspiring students to work to overcome challenges they may face. They can inspire students to set goals, develop a growth mindset, and persevere through challenges.
Connecting History and Real-Life Experiences
Relating to historical figures can be challenging. We often forget that these were real people with feelings and emotions. Biographies can help make people more relatable and can help humanize historical figures. Understanding the human stories behind these historical events can help students make connections that bring history to life.
Build Critical Thinking Skills
Reading biographies can help students build critical thinking skills. Students may analyze biographies to determine the person’s motivations, decisions, and consequences of the person’s actions. Students may also use critical thinking to determine the individual’s character traits.
Build Appreciation of Cultural and Background Diversities
Biographies help students learn about people from different walks of life. Biographies can introduce students to different perspectives and help them understand the importance of how diversity shapes our world.
Help Develop Research Skills
Incorporating biographies into lessons can help students develop research skills. Students may use biographies to gather information and develop note-taking skills. Using biographies is a great way for students to learn how to write reports, create presentations, or create projects.
Students can easily become overwhelmed by the thoughts of a research paper. Biography Graphic Organizers and templates are an excellent way to introduce students to researching and writing a biographical research paper.
Using Biographies in Upper Elementary with Biography Graphic Organizers
These Biography Research Project and Writing Templates are designed to help your students easily complete a biographical research paper, and create a fun final project.
Use this easy-to-use project to help your students learn how to write a biographical research paper. Choose from 4 different graphic organizers. Students will use the graphic organizers to help them organize important information they read in biographies. Then use the easy template for writing and creating a fun biography project. This packet can be used in a variety of ways.
Just look at what other teachers have said.
“Great resource to use when writing our biographies. The graphic organizers really helped students keep their writing organized.”
Dena L.
“This was a great resource for teaching my students how to do a research paper. After completing this worksheets one student told me that “the essay practically writes itself now.” The best part was that no one turned in a paper copied from online resources. The students had already done all the research and then easily put things into their own words from what they’d written in their worksheets.”
Jami B.
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Interested in information on teaching another genre? Check out my blog post on Teaching Tall Tales.
