Not Your Average Portfolio

Students learn about the life of a famous person to create a non-fiction portfolio about the individual.

Engage

Begin by asking students to define what makes a biography. What sort of things would they expect to find in a biography about a person's life?

Share a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and ask students to work in pairs to generate questions about his life. Assign a web graphic organizer and discuss how categories and subcategories can be used to summarize a person's life achievements.

Web Organizer

Using their idea webs, work as a class to choose the categories they will include in their biographical portfolios of other figures. For example:

• Background Information
• Major Contributions
• Challenges and Obstacles
• Unique Aspects

Create

Team students together to research a historical figure and develop a portfolio. Have student teams identify what they already know about this person, as well as things they do not know but want to learn.

Students should begin researching and skimming biographies to answer the questions they generated about their selected person and add this information to the categories on another web organizer.

Once the research and writing are complete, teams should consider how to design the portfolio to represent and reflect their individual. Students can use a storyboard to design the layout for their individual’s portfolio.

Storyboard Template

When the web organizer, storyboard, and written descriptions are complete, students are ready to start creating the portfolio. If time is limited, you may want to encourage students to open and work from an existing portfolio template.

Leather Book Template

Share

Have teams present their portfolios to the entire class or small groups of students and make a pitch about why this individual would make a great potential employee.

English Language Arts Standards - K-12

Reading Standards

Key Ideas and Details
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

Craft and Structure
4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

Writing Standards

Text Types and Purposes
2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge
7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation