Book Talk: The Who Was Series

This week I'm going to be focusing on books, series and authors that are HUGE in my classroom.

One of the types of books I try to promote in my classroom is biographical texts. This has been largely hit and miss, unfortunately. So I went out in search of some new biographical material. This brought me to the Who Was . . . series of books. These books are fairly short, the better readers get through them in about a day, and are all biographies of famous people. The range covers scientists, pioneers, presidents and people who were just amazing in their field.

What I particularly like about them is their structure. The text doesn't dominate the page, there's line drawings throughout to add to the book, and there's also little information boxes which give you more information about the time or the place, helping the students place the books into a wider context. My goal is to really push the other biographical material in the room now, to make the connections between the books they've already read, and all those still out there.

Some of the favourites in the class:
Who were the Beatles?
Who is Barack Obama?
Who was Amelia Earhart?

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