What about biographies and memoirs??????

Literature and the Child

Eighth Edition

By: Lee Galda, Lawrence Sipe, Lauren Liang, Bernice Cullinan

How to include it in your classroom:  Biographies and memoirs are great to teach to 5th graders.  They can be included in their ELA module.  I taught about biographies to my 5th graders last year and they loved writing their own biographies as a project.  

Biographies and memoirs are stories of people’s lives.   Biographies and memoirs must present accurate depictions of the time and place in which the subject lived.  Facts and story line must be accurate as well but as I learned through this course some times this may not be the case. 

When I was a 5^th grade special ed teacher last year I was so excited to introduce what a biography was to my 5^th graders.  They were excited as well to learn about them. One of the biographies that we read was Promises to Keep.  This was a biography about Jackie Robinson.  His daughter wrote it.  I had never seen my students so engaged before when they started reading this book.  The biography walked about Jackie’s struggles through out his life as an African American baseball player.  Many of my boys in the class couldn't put the book down most days because they wanted to know more and more about his life.  The book did a great job explaining the issues African Americans had to deal with back in the day.  As a class we would compare how these issues are the same and different now a days.  I truly enjoyed reading this biography with my students. 

Cullinan, B. (1989). Literature and the child (2nd ed.). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.