Last year for her birthday L received a book called Girls Who Rocked the World from her Auntie. It consists of short stories of women throughout history and modern day who have somehow "rocked the world". This has been one of the most influential books L has ever read. She constantly re-reads bits and refers to it. She has also become almost obsessed with the stories of some of the women in the book.
Last year it was Joan of Arc. L took out all the books she could find at the library on the subject and became a Joan of Arc expert. She wrote a short essay on her life which she presented at an open mic night. She still wants to be her for Halloween.
This summer she moved on to a new heroine. Anne Frank. I have to say I was really hoping to leave learning about WWII until L was older than 7 so I didn't encourage it. L wouldn't be put off and once again got out all of the books she could find on Anne Frank from the library. She read them all and then started asking questions. I really tried to not go into too much detail while still being able to relay the horrors of that time. Finally I gave in and said that she and I could read Anne Frank's actual diary together.
We took our time and read excerpts together at night before bed. After finishing we looked into what happened to Anne and her fellow Secret Annex members. We also watched a few videos on tours of the actual secret annex. It is really such a hard thing to talk about and so heart breaking.
I felt like L needed to do something to feel some sort of conclusion to the whole subject. She ended up doing this clever "Who am I?" book. It is really the perfect little project to put together research information in a creative way.
You can find the tutorial here on Susan Gaylord's blog.
These are so cute and I can see us using them a lot for different research projects throughout the year.
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