Biographies

Hello!

What does your biography section look like? Do you have a lot of the Childhood of Famous Americans series and not much else? Are they beat up and unattractive?

Check out the biography section and see what grade levels are represented. When you study science, make sure you have science biographies. Some schools have large sports biography sections. It can be hard to know WHO to put in the biography section. Here are some guidelines and then some suggestions.

Guideline 1: Make sure you have a number of presidents of the United States represented. I would hope that most (if not all) of them are represented.

Guideline 2: Check that there are biographies on all reading levels, even beginning readers.

Guideline 3: Look for biographies on people who are good role models and who will be known throughout the years. Think about Malala, Mother Teresa, Mark Zuckerman, Bill Gates, etc. It may be that your community has someone who is important. There might be a biography written about them.

Guideline 4: Sports people are fine, but many of them are short term as far as popularity goes. If you have a lot of sports biographies, you may need to weed often and purchase often to keep it updated.

Guideline 5: There are sets of Christian biographies that focus on Christian leaders. We put the Trailblazer series in our biography section. Also look for the Heroes of the Faith series. The ones we have in our library are white with a maroon strip at the top. People included in this set are John Bunyan, Fanny Crosby, Jim Elliot, Billy Graham, C. S. Lewis, David Livingstone, Martin Luther, D. L. Moody, Samuel Morris, John Newton, Charles Spurgeon, Corrie ten Boom, Mother Teresa, Sojourner Truth, and John Wesley. There are more, but this list will give you some ideas of what the series is like.

Guideline 6: Check to see if you have biographies on Ellen G. White. There may also be biographies on other SDA leaders to include, too.

Suggestions: If you need to update your lower reading level biographies, I would urge you to consider a set we have gotten this year. Brad Meltzer has begun to write biographies for young readers. He started writing them after going to the store with his young daughter and finding lots of ‘princess’ shirts and clothing. He began to wonder where the strong women role models were for his daughter. When he didn’t see what he wanted, he began to write them. His series is titled “Ordinary People Change the World”. Titles so far are “I Am Amelia Earhart, I am Lucille Ball, I am Abraham Lincoln, I am Rosa Parks, I am Albert Einstein, I am Jackie Robinson, I am Helen Keller, and I am Martin Luther King, Jr.” Coming next September will be “I am George Washington, and I am Jane Goodall.” The illustrations are cartoonish and there are speech bubbles in the text, but the information is solid and our first and second graders love them. I have also given them to lower readers in third and even fourth grade.



Another set we got is published by Scholastic and is called Rookie Biographies.




I hope you enjoy your biographies and consider updating them from time to time.

Have a great Spring Vacation!

Audrey

Currently reading:
The Indiscretions of Archie by P. G. Wodehouse
The Millionaires by Brad Meltzer
Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit
These High, Green Hills by Jan Karon (Book 3 of the Mitford series)