Buzzing about Biography & Winter Word Work Freebie!

Oh, biography, why are we studying you right before Christmas when I what I really want to do is spend all day reading Christmas and holiday poems and stories? But alas, we live in the land of NCLB, and if children don’t understand biography the difference in point of view compared to an autobiography, we’ll all end up dead from zombie attacks, killer robots, or thinking we can control dinosaurs by making them lysine dependent. I’ll do what I can, future, to make sure you don’t happen like I think you might probably happen anyway.

Anyway, I am SO EXCITED to be teaching biography! I know Snowflake Bentley would have been an awesome awesome choice, but I needed something where everyone had a copy for shared reading. This being said, I also wanted to kill a few birds by reading about someone who had been a “good citizen” and address some of our social studies standards. This is how we ended up learning about Helen Keller (always a shocking read for little people, and for myself, actually. It blows my mind a little) and Harriet Tubman. We practiced reading for information and gathered facts on our graphic organizers.

First, as a class, we read about and recorded facts about Helen Keller:

This week, we’ll be reading an autobiography and comparing the points of view between the two.

Also, sometimes this week (probably Friday) we’ll be doing this word work! After perusing my free printable from Teachers Pay Teachers and reading about building words from the letters in “Winter Wonderland,” I decided that is exactly what we need to do in order to keep children from overdosing on candy in my classroom. So here’s what it looks like (the letters can be cut out to manipulate) and you can grab it here.