Annotated Bibliography Genre 3: Biography/Autobiography

Genre Study

      The book genre that I chose for this week is that of Biography/Autobiography. Typically biographies and autobiographies detail the lives of famous people. Biographies are written about a certain person without their own involvement, and autobiographies are written by the famous person themselves or with the help of an actual writer. These books could be based on famous musicians to war heroes. These books can be written at many different reading levels, ranging from simple picture books to dense text driven books. This genre definitely lends itself to social studies based material. As I stated earlier, these books come in a wide range of reading, so I could see myself having many books on the same subject but on different reading levels. This would supplement both lower leveled readers and higher leveled readers. These would mostly be used in conjunction with lessons on prominent figures throughout history. Perhaps I would even have children choose someone that they were interested and let them do a project on the given person. Books like these usually have a healthy amount information, so I would wager that most could be used in the classroom without issue. This is not to say that all would be useful for learning activities, but they would all provide information and entertainment for children.

Selected Titles

1. B. Franklin Printer 

      This book has a 970 Lexile level, so it sits somewhere between 5th and 6th grade for proper accessibility. This is most definitely not a book that I would advise reading aloud in any classroom. Perhaps reading excerpts from it would be fine, but whole thing would probably be too much. The book has an index, table of contents, and timeline to get an idea of where to go and what was going on in Ben's life at the time.  The does a fairly great job of covering key events from Ben's life. The paragraphs are well written and there are some tricky words that come up every so often, but nothing too serious. I would definitely have this book in my classroom because of the wealth of information. 

References:

 Adler, D. A. (2002). B. Franklin, printer. New York: Scholastic.

2. Who Was Ben Franklin?

      This book has a 600 Lexile level, so it sits somewhere between 2nd and 3rd grade for comfortable reading level. Those grade levels could definitely read this independently for the most part. It would definitely be an easy read for many, but it has tons of great content. Much like the last book this book covers the life of Ben Franklin. The book has a table of contents, and also has a timeline of important events throughout Ben's life. This book would be great to have to supplement a unit on important American figures. The writing is not particularly difficult, and should be fairly easy for most children in the 2nd and 3rd grade to digest.

References:

 Fradin, D. B., & O'Brien, J. (2002). Who was Ben Franklin? New York: Grosset & Dunlap.