Researching biographical information:
Year 6 Literacy lessons
As part of a week's work on biography in Literacy, Year 6 pupils chose a well-known personality and searched for biographical information on the web. They presented their findings in the style of a newspaper biography using Publisher. The lessons took place over two one-hour sessions in the school's ICT suite.
Pupils already understood what kinds of facts they were looking for. The first session was spent locating and storing web sites that the children thought might be useful in writing their biography. They were encouraged to look critically at web content and reject sites that were not helpful.
The class used Yahooligans to conduct searches. The children and the teacher felt this was more appropriate than a more powerful search engine such as Google because all the results have been assessed as being suitable for children.
In the second session, pupils were reminded of the features of Publisher they would need. The teacher re-capped copying and pasting images from web pages into Publisher. The class revised the main features of a newspaper front page including the headline, first paragraph and text layout. The pupils were reminded of the characteristics of language found on a news page, including direct quotations, alliteration, puns and a variety of connectives. The children were secure in these ideas as a result of previous Literacy lessons.
Working in pairs, the children started from a blank page to produce a newspaper biography of their personality. They were able to explain their decisions about language: "We chose Potty about Potter as our headline because it's short and snappy, it's alliteration."
The pupils revisited the web sites they had found in the first session and copied pictures into their publication. They explained the advantages of using pictures from the Internet: "Harry Potter hadn't come out when they made this clip art." "You can get pictures of people in clip art, but not real people."