Biography project

You may have heard, from your child, about the BIG biography project that we started this week.  The kids are pretty excited about it! They were allowed to chose a famous person for their biography project.  We began the week learning how to use the internet to take notes.  We talked about how to decide what sites to use.  We practiced skimming and scanning through the MOUNDS of information to find what we needed.  Thursday and Friday of this week we used the laptops to research our people and take notes.  We learned about the importance of note taking techniques, not copying what we find, but putting it into our own words.  We worked on bibliographies.  The students also used the laptops to find pictures and a video clip to include in their presentations. 

This project will continue over the next couple of weeks.  This week we will be writing our first drafts (Monday and Tuesday), and then typing our final drafts (Wednesday and Thursday).  There are several other projects that go with these biographies.  Students will be making "Famous People Bookmarks", acrostic poems, Fakebook pages for each famous person, and more...

The following week we will be learning how to present our biographies (Yes, that means speeches). 

The students were shocked at the number of Iowa standards that we're going to assess with this project.  In the end it will be worth over 200 points!