Day 16 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Picture Book Biographies

Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi! My name is Kate Narita. This is day sixteen of my summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge. Today I will be talking about picture book biographies.

Slide 2: Before I get started with the biographies, I want to explain where I got this idea. My friend, mentor and fellow author, Melissa Stewart, suggested I read two of the biographies I will be talking about today. Melissa has written over one hundred books for kids. They are fabulous. Here are two of them that I use in my classroom each year. 

The first one is A Place for Butterflies. This is actually a series. So you can read about birds, bats, turtles and fish in the other books in the series. This is a great text for teaching nonfiction text structures. Across the top of the book she uses cause and effect, and the sidebars are problem and solution text structure. So, highly recommended for teaching your students about various types of text structures.

​Another book I want to recommend is No Monkeys, No Chocolate. This is a fantastic book. Who doesn’t like to read about chocolate? Also, there are these super cute bookworms that add another layer of text which is super fun. Finally, the resource that Melissa created on her website is phenomenal. It’s a timeline, and on that timeline she includes various drafts of the book. So, students can check out other text structures as well and students can see just how much authors revise before they are able to sell a book.

Slide 3: Slide 3: The first picture book biography that Melissa recommended I read is The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Sarah Jacoby. This is an outstanding book. It’s a love letter to Margaret Wise Brown It celebrates her. It also celebrates the fact that the books that she wrote were considered strange, and even though they were considered strange, she didn’t care. She felt they had to be written for children. The book is forty-two pages and Margaret Wise Brown lived for forty-two years. So the number of pages correlates with her age. The artwork is absolutely exquisite.

Another great aspect of this book is that it has a lot of direct address which means that it asks questions of the reader as you go along. Not everyone likes direct address; however, if you are a teacher trying to implement an interactive read aloud in your classroom, I highly recommend starting with this book because the questions are in the text. You don’t even have to think about which ones you’re going to ask.

One person who is not portrayed positively in this book is Anne Carroll Moore. That’s because she recommended that people not read Margaret Wise Brown’s books. So I would pair this biography with Miss Moore Thought Otherwise.

Slide 4: I think it’s important for students to see that people are going to take action. This action is going to be perceived as positive by some and negative by others. It’s important to note that not any one person is all bad or all good.

I also think this is an excellent way to start your students in the practice of debate. After reading both of these biographies, your students can have a debate about whether or not Miss Anne Carroll Moore should have banned Margaret Wise Brown’s books. So, it’s a great way to get your class into an important, heated discussion.

Slide 5: The next biography Melissa suggested I read is Hedy Lamarr’s Double Life: Hollywood Legend and Brilliant Inventor. I am crazy about this book. I have loved Laurie Wallmark’s other biographies but this one is my favorite for a couple of reasons.

On a practical level, I can use this while teaching science. Every year I have to talk about frequencies which is not something I feel confident about. They actually illustrate wave frequencies in this book, and now I have a concrete example of why they’re useful. Hedy Lamarr designed a system called frequency hopping which allowed us to be successful in World War II. Frequency hopping enabled submarines to launch torpedoes and not have their direction affected by the enemy. Today we use frequency hopping to have private cell phone conversations or to send texts privately. Without Hedy Lamarr we may not have had this technology, or we may not have found it as soon as we did. So, we owe a great debt to Hedy Lamarr.

Besides the practical aspect of this book, what I absolutely love was that Hedy Lamarr was a gorgeous Hollywood actress yet she was incredibly smart. Yet people thought that just because she was beautiful that she couldn’t be smart. In fact, they thought she was dumb. One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “People seem to think because I have a pretty face I’m stupid… I have to work twice as hard as anyone else to convince people I have something resembling a brain.” I want my female students to know that they don’t have to choose between one and the other. They can be attractive and smart or smart and attractive. I think often times females think they have to choose between one and the other. 

Slide 6: This idea of choosing between one quality and another quality reminded me of Between the Lines: How Ernie Barnes Went from the Football Field to the Art Gallery (I said Banks (I got my sports mixed up), but meant Barnes!) This is an outstanding picture book biography. We used it this year when my class was doing a mock Sibert medal contest and my boys absolutely loved this book. They loved this book because they were seeing a man who succeeded in football, he was an NFL star, and he succeeded as an artist. Often times boys think they have to choose between am I going to be an athlete or am I going to be an artist. When in fact, people can be both. I will link in the vlog post below to the January blog posts my students wrote. You can see just how powerful this book is and how much it affected them. 

Slide 7: The next picture book biography I’m going to talk about  was released in 2016. So, it’s possible you may know about it, but I hadn’t read it before. This is the incredible story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah. He biked almost 400 miles across Ghana in forty days. It’s incredible It would be incredible for anybody but what makes his story especially amazing is that when he was born he was born with one strong leg and one leg that was never going to develop the way the other leg developed. He had to overcome incredible discrimination all throughout his life. His mother told him he could get anything as long as he got it himself, and he did.

Another wonderful aspect of this book is he realized he needed help to reach his goal. So he wrote a letter to an agency in the United States who helped athletes with challenges reach their goals. The agency sent him a bike, helmets and shorts so that he could reach his goal. This is a wonderful example for students because it shows them that anything is possible and never take no for an answer. 

Slide 8: This of course made me think about ​Girl Running: Bobbi Gibb and the Boston Marathon. This is another book we read this year when we did our mock Sibert Medal contest. It’s a fantastic story about how Bobbi Gibb persevered and became the first female to run the Boston Marathon in 1966. She also didn’t take no for an answer.

Slide 9: The last story I want to talk about today is Game Changers: The Story of Venus and Serena Williams. This is also a title we used in our mock Sibert medal contest. Unfortunately, none of my students chose to feature this book which really disappointed me because I thought it was outstanding. It’s a great example of people who overcame racial and gender inequality to reach their goals. What’s incredible about this book other than the story which is simply phenomenal is the artwork. The artwork in this book is incredible. There’s this one spread where the hair beads of one of the Williams’ sisters is flying across the page and it’s breathtakingly gorgeous. I wanted to include this title in my picture book biography presentation because it’s a fantastic book that didn’t get as much press as it should have.