Videos and Computers
Making movies is not an easy task, but video cameras have given more children a chance to experience this art. Choosing what scenes to portray and critiquing he performances give children a chance to look back at a story for important clues to characters' emotions and moods before they take on the roles. Yvonne Anderson's informative book How to Make Your Own Animated Movies and Videotapes describes her work with children aged 5 to 18 in creating films. In Making Your Own Movies, Harry Helfman gives hints about how to operate a simple, inexpensive movie camera and presents some basic techniques for shooting a film.  A description of panning a picture is given, along with ways to vary the length of the shot.  Considering the time involved in making movies, a teacher might want to work with someone knowledgeable in the field.
            Computer technology presents children with an ever-increasing variety of ways to respond to books. After reading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Cat Running and Jerry Stanley's Children of the Dust Bowl about migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, several fifth-grade children worked with the school's computer specialist to create a documentary that explored the Great Depression. They prepared a CD-ROM program that included pictures of migrant workers, the dust bowl, fruit packing labels, and depression-era songs that served as an important backdrop for understanding some of the books' themes and connected children to larger issues about that era.

Author Studies
An author study is an excellent way to combine learning about the craft of writing and the genre of biography and autobiography. An author study may be conducted by a whole class, by small groups of children who share an interest in a particular author, or by individual children. After reading as much of the author's work as possible and locating biographical information about the author, children can identify and discuss patterns in the author's work. How might the author's life experiences have influenced his or her writing? Older children may want to synthesize the biographical information they have obtained and compose a presentation about the author for their classmates. Jean Fritz is an author who is well known for her biographical writings. A study of her life and work might be an apt choice in a unit on biography.
            Many authors now have their own websites or websites created by their fans; these sites are often good sources for biographical information. Additionally, there are many well-written biographies and autobiographies of children's authors available. Richard C. Owens Publishers have produced a Meet the Author series of photobiographies. The authors who have written for this series discuss their writing process, providing models for young writers to follow.

Conversations with the People Past and Present
Biographies help children to understand other people's life experiences and how those experiences shaped their perspectives and actions. Ask your students to try on the role of the person they are reading about. Choose a topic and ask several students to converse about the topic while staying in character. How would the subjects of these various biographies interact with each other? Give the students some time to get into the role by asking them to complete a role sheet in preparation for the discussion. A sample role sheet is provided.

Chapter 12 Recording Sheet (19.0K)