Young students enjoy stories a lot, be it fictional or non-fictional. Incorporating stories in lesson is an effective way to engage them in learning. Say for example, we want them to learn certain vocabularies, we can include those words in the story we want to cover. As a result, they could better grasp the new vocabulary as they see how it is used in context. Also, the more elaborately students encode the new word during its initial lesson, the better they could recall the new word (if you're interested, you may want to look up the cognitive topic of "maintenance rehearsal vs elaborative rehearsal").
Undeniably, there are lots of other things students could learn by reading biographies - of famous people. Plus, true stories are more inspiring than fiction.
These are some of the objectives of the lesson and activities that we can expect our students to achieve:
- To understand what is a "biography".
- Explain that biography narrates a person's life and achievements, specifically those who have made a difference in the world.
- To acquire new vocabularies.
- Discuss the key and new vocabulary words from the biographies.
- To gain the benefits of learning biographies.
- Inspirational readings for students - students should understand that everyone has their own struggles but from biographies they learn how these inspiring people faced problems, overcame obstacles, but determined to succeed.
- Students learn that hard work and perseverance are the key elements needed in the process of being successful.
- The students might feel burdened/bored if we directly dive into the biography, because the text might be long and some words might be novel to them. So, we should make them excited on what they are going to learn. How? One and the most practical way is to make your introduction relevant and relatable to their prior knowledge.
- To keep their interest, understand them and bring the story to where they want to rather than expecting them to come to our level. We should be able to modify our lesson according to the student's needs.
- Neil Armstrong
- Albert Einstein
- Steve Jobs
