Part 2 Flashcards
(16 cards)
although related to autobiographies in that they deal with the authors’ lives, focus on the authors’ revelations of what events in their lives meant to them, not the events themselves (Barrington, 1997).
Memoirs
can also be classified by coverage of the subject’s life
Biographies
covers the entire life of the subject from birth to death. An example is Napoléon: The Story of the Little Corporal by Robert Burleigh.
Complete biography
covers only part of the life of the subject. Biographies for very young children will often be of this type, as will, of course, the biographies of living persons. An example is The Young Hans Christian Andersen by Karen Hesse, illustrated by Erik Blegvad.
Partial biography
includes the life stories of several people in one book, organized into chapters. An example is Women Daredevils: Thrills, Chills, and Frills by Julie Cummins, illustrated by Cheryl Harness.
Collected biography
is a multivolume set of books with each book containing one separate biography. For example, the First Biographies series by David A. Adler includes biographies on such subjects as Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jackie Robinson.
Biography series
BIOGRAPHY
fulfills all of these criteria and is particularly appealing to young readers because it is told from the perspective of the author as a 6-year-old.
Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges and Margo Lundell
all factual information is documented through eyewitness accounts, written documents, letters, diaries, and, more recently, audio and video recordings. Details in the lives of people who lived long ago, such as conversations, are often difficult to document, however. So, for the sake of art, biographers must use such devices as interior monologue (telling what someone probably thought or said to himself or herself based on known actions), indirect discourse (reporting the gist of what someone said without using quotation marks), attribution (interpretation of known actions to determine probable motives), and inference to make their stories lively and appealing and worth the children’s time to read. It is advisable to read and compare several biographies of a subject, if possible, to counteract any bias an author might have. Painting the Wild Frontier: The Art and Adventures of George Catlin by Susanna Reich is an example of an authentic biography.
Authentic biography
is also based on careful research, but the author creates dramatic episodes from known facts by using imagined conversation. The conversation is, of course, carefully structured around the pertinent facts that are known, but the actual words are invented by the author.
Fictionalized biography
Much artistic license is allowed in biographical fiction, including invented dialogue, fictional secondary characters, and some reconstructed action. The known achievements of the biographical subjects are reported accurately, but in other respects these works are as much fiction as fact. Due to a trend toward greater authenticity in children’s nonfiction, biographical fiction is relatively rare today. An example is If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks by Faith Ringgold.
Biographical Fiction
Two awards have been established to honor nonfiction works:
the Orbis Pictus Award for Nonfiction, first awarded in 1990, and the Robert F. Sibert Award for Nonfiction, first awarded in 2001.
Section 3
Historical Fiction and Biography in the Classroom
An example of a hands-on activity to help build prior knowledge and to reinforce contextual understandings is the
Jackdaw
a collection of artifacts or copies of realia from a particular historical period or event.
Jackdaw
are often available in museums for study of a period of history, and some museums lend them to teachers for use in schools. The term jackdaw refers to a common European bird that is related to the crow and known to collect colorful objects for its nest.
Jackdaw
1.The Braid by Helen Frost.
2.Down the Colorado: John Wesley Powell, the One-Armed Explorer by Deborah Kogan Ray.
3. Theodore Roosevelt: Champion of the American Spirit by Betsy H. Kraft.
4. Onward: A Photobiography of African-American Polar Explorer Matthew Henson by Dolores Johnson.
- 12-16 ages
- 8-11 ages
- 10-14 ages
- 11-14
