Biography Inquiry Jump Start

To jump start an inquiry research project I chose to start with a read aloud.  Duh, I'm a librarian.  The objective is to begin a research unit on importance of past United States presidents.  Instead of the typical, fact gathering research, my hope is to make the students think deeper and more at what really matters about the subject.
So, I started with a picture of the Washington DC Mall that maps out the Presidential memorials.  They noticed only 5 out of 44 presidents have a memorial.  I then read aloud Looking at Lincoln by Maira Kalman.  This biographical information book shares the life of Abraham Lincoln and ends with a look at his memorial in Washington, DC.  After listening I asked students to write about why they think Abraham Lincoln was one of the 5 presidents chosen to have a memorial.  This is the first of two lessons on biography inquiries.  The next lesson students will choose one of the other 4 presidents to learn more about. They will have to justify why they were also chosen to have a memorial on the Mall.

Voting for a Favorite Book

In Texas, 3rd - 6th grade students have the opportunity to vote on their favorite book from a list of 20 nominated books - The Bluebonnet Award.  To help my students make an educated decision on which book to vote for, we looked at criteria for award-winning books.  With this lesson they listed their ideas of what makes a good book and then listened to me read aloud a recent award-winning book.  I chose Beautiful Blackbird by Ashley Bryan (a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Winner).  We also explored the criteria to win a Coretta Scott King Award.  Through the process students then created their own criteria of how they will choose the Bluebonnet Award winner.  At the end of the lesson we then looked at how to find other award-winning books using the online catalog.