Literary Nonfiction: what’s important in a biography?

In the upper grades (2-5), we planned a unit in which the teacher reads several literary nonfiction texts and looks for specific things in each one, and then adds them to a matrix to help students make connections across texts.

This is the way our matrix looks in third grade:

In case you can’t read the questions, they’re

– Who is the subject/main person?

– What are their traits?

– What are their motivations or goals?

– What challenges does he or she face?

– How do they overcome the challenge?

– What lesson can we learn from their life?

We chose to read…

and Snowflake Bentley – one of my favorites!

It’s especially difficult for kids to understand and decide on a lesson, moral, or theme for the text. Our teachers worked on the theme as the learning that the character does or the reader can do as a result of how the problem is solved (or challenge is overcome).

Question for you: Which biographies do you love to read with kids? Which have the best messages for us to learn?