Carolina Girl: A Writer's Beginning Book

• Summarize the book
This book talks about the life and accomplishments of Barak Obama. It starts out talking about how he gave a speech in 2004 announcing that he would be running for president of the United States. The book then talks about his life as a young child growing up in Hawaii and how his father who was from Kenya, had left his mother. It also talked about how his mother remarried a Muslim man who took Barak to a mosque. Barak then became a Christian after attending a Catholic school. The book then talks about his life as a teenager as well as how he met his wife Michelle when he working for a summer in Chicago while he was in law school at Harvard. He was the able to win a seat in the state senate in Illinois. That prompted him to run for the House of Representatives, but he lost the election. He then decided that he wanted to run for president and he won. He became the first African American to be president. The end of the book also shows a timeline of the significant events in his life.
• Identify the characteristics from the text that support the specific genre (What makes it traditional literature? What makes it historical fiction?)
This is a biography because it talks about the life story of a person who made an impact in history. This book was written by someone else about Barak Obama witch make it a biography and not an autobiography.
• Identify specific literary or educational concepts that could be integrated into the classroom. (eg. This book is a good text to use when teaching how to make inferences, or This books deals with bullying and would be useful when beginning a discussion about bullying in the classroom.)
This would be a great book for younger readers who are beginning to learn about doing research or reading about specific people. It would be perfect to use this book if you wanted to show students an example of a biography and how to use it. The timeline could also be used as an example if you were doing a social studies lesson about timelines.
• Provide any other suggestions that would be useful regarding literary content, reading level, and other ways in which the book might be integrated.
This books is written at a 3rd grade reading level and could be used in any of the intermediate grades if they wanted to read or do research about Barak Obama.