I am a Third grade teacher and I am wanting to have the students read a biograghy this year. Does anyone have any fun projects to with them?

[enterprisetaf]

Every year I have my class do a biography report on a famous person. If you have time and the resources, creating a Hyper Studio report is fun for the kids. Then we have a Biography Day when everyone dresses up like their person and we visit all of the other classrooms. The children prepare a 2 or 3 sentence intoduction to read to the classes. Then we read or view their reports in the classroom and take pictures

Another class has everyone dress up and pretend they are in a museum. This way every class visits them and they prepare something to say about their person when a red dot on their hand is pressed. Great fun!

I hope this helps.

I had my assistant make cube patterns out of poster board (these make a 3-d cube or box). The students had instructions of what to write on each side of the cube:
1. name, birthdate, deathdate
2. what the person was famous for
3. they glued a picture of their person
4. something they found interesting that they didn't know
5. important facts
6. I think on this side, we listed our resources.

It gave the kids something concrete to hold and handle. They love it. At the end of the unit, they shared their cubes and we hung them from clothes hangins to display.

[Amber]

I did this when I student taught, and I'm planning on doing it again this year since I'm teaching 3rd again. We read the Helen Keller book by Margaret Davis as a class. There were lots of great activities we did with that book (character journals, vocabulary mapping, research on Louis Braille & sign language). While we were doing these activities with the class, the kids were individually choosing a person to research for our class wax museum. After we finished the Helen Keller unit as a class, we worked on putting together our wax museum presentations. The kids wrote a small speech and memorized it. On the day of the wax museum, they dressed up like their person. We sent invitations to the 1st and 2nd grade classes. They signed up for a time that day they wanted to come. We set the class up like a museum and the younger kids went through it. They visited each desk individually and listened to each child's presentation. It went really well, and I liked having the one biography that the whole class did together because it gave us a chance to work on nonfiction reading strategies.

Hope this helps!

~Amber