Influential Women in History

We began the month of March diving into Women's History Month.  I wanted the students to learn about the lives of influential women who have had some sort of impact upon the world.  So we started by reading Mae Among the Stars, a story about Dr. Mae Jemison as a little girl.  We also read an informational article, taken from Little Leaders, about her accomplishments and contributions to society.  We looked at the structures of both, what information we can gather from both, and how both are intended for different purposes. 

By doing this, the kids learned a lot about this fascinating and accomplished woman.  They saw how the narrative focused on a specific moment in her life and how the informational text gave facts about the entire span of her life.  We made this anchor chart to show the differences between the two texts and what we learned from them.

The students then set out to create a slide detailing the contributions Mae had on our society.  I gave them this file on Google Slides and they typed in the information by adding text boxes.  

Next, I lead the students through a directed drawing of Dr. Jemison using this resource from The Book Wrangler.  It is a very simple drawing that the kids were able to do with no problems at all.  

We then did the same thing, reading a narrative and informational text then following a directed drawing, about two more women -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Malala.  (in the slide deck there is also a slide for Sacagawea and Frieda Kahlo, however we did not get to those women this year.)

To put it all together, we cut out and mounted our directed drawings and informational slides (I printed them out two to a page to make them smaller) on the Ambitious Girl backgrounds that we made in a previous lesson.  You can see how we made those here.

And that was it!  The kids really learned a lot about some amazing women, got to dig into various types of texts, used the computer, did some drawing and art, and the final products look SO good hanging up in our room.