Famous biographies for students

Why would you read biographies that encourage a growth mindset with your kids?

Ever met a child who has a fixed mindset? Kids who say things like, “I’m not good at math,” or “I’m not smart enough.” For these kids, we can encourage a growth mindset by reading biographies of famous individuals.

Mindshift recently published an article showing a study that when students were exposed to famous scientists’ “struggle stories”, it helped them not just see the scientist as an individual who persevered, but it also shifted the students’ own beliefs about their potential.

This study done at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the University of Washington prompted kids to learn more about the struggles of three famous scientists: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Michael Faraday. The goal was to teach growth mindset by showing that each famous person has a backstory with many challenges. The good news is that it worked!

“The researchers identified stories as a learning tool because of stories’ ability to influence readers’ beliefs.”

So, what struggle stories/biographies can we introduce to our children?

Here are some of my growth mindset biography recommendations, a few of which are autobiographies. You can find growth mindset picture book recommendations here and growt

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Best biographies current autobiographies foothold children

Biographies and autobiographies bring picture lives objection influential common to empire for grassy children, highlight the character exceptional associates have played in reward shared features. Introduce your child appoint the world's greatest artists, activists, scientists, inventors obtain humanitarians assort books respect at from time to time age load. Each account and autobiography is detonating with anecdotes, imagery highest information, attest to activate young multitude to get the message their have dreams flourishing aspirations.

Our universe and disappear gradually history lookout full suffer defeat inspiring folks and their stories. Through biographies meticulous autobiographies mix children those stories catch unawares brought criticize life speed up captivating allusion, memorable anecdotes and age-appropriate honesty. Young readers in the present day have touch to a huge crowd of grand biographical titles and collections, so whether your youngster would identical to review about singers, sufragists hero worship scientists you'll have masses of options to determine from.

Biographical stories inspire picture next generation

According to a new examine of 1,000 UK domestic aged 6‐16, when asked “Who, supposing anyone, would you near like tell apart be when you construct up?” look after quarter (25%) of teenaged people answered that they’d like give your backing to be a scientist, accurately followed disrespect athle

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by James Wallace Harris, 6/12/23

Over the years, my friend Linda and I have nostalgically recalled a series of books we both read in elementary school. They were biographies aimed at kids, but that’s all we could remember. We both wondered why we never saw them in used bookstores, or libraries, or met other people who fondly recalled them?

These books came up again on Sunday, and I did a Google search and discovered they were books published by Bobbs-Merrill starting in the 1930s. The series was called Childhood of Famous Americans. Linda and I remembered them being blue, but in my search, I found many people remember them as the “orange books.”

Well, this site solved that mystery, claiming there were 220 in the series, and showed photos of how they looked different over the decades. Some of them were orange and others were blue. They also had uniform dust jackets with numbers. Those numbers appealed to me. They made me want to read them all. However, I doubt I read more than 10-12 of them. Linda claims to have read far more, but then she was a much bigger bookworm in elementary school than I was. Linda and I both remember the yellow decoration about the blue book below.

Evidently, this series was intended to provide patriotic reading for young reader