Online Biography Resource for 5th Grade?

November 26, 2007 6:47 PM

Any suggestions for online biography resources for 5th graders? My lovely teacher-wife's students will soon be doing research on various people in history. The students are a diverse crowd.

The students are researching a wide variety of people from Hymen Rickover to Andy Warhol to Picasso and Houdini.

Sadly Wikipedia and the like can't be accessed from the school and biosforkids.com doesn't quite have the range. Yes, the library is excellent, but for this project we'd like to use the internet.

posted by snsranch to Education (3 answers total)

Best answer: The American Library Association has made a pretty decent list of both individual bio pages as well as collections of biographies. It's a shame they can't get to Wikipedia because all the images are theirs for the taking, but of the list the ALA put together biography.com is good but a little ad-heavy and the reading level may be too high depending on the kids (they rate it as for middle schoolers) but there are a LOT of people there.

Keep in mind that you can use the library AND the Internet. Depending on what library you have access to, you might have access to really great biographical databases like Biographies online. Do you have a San Diego Public Library card? If so check out these databases particularly the biography resource center. And there are local resources like the San Diego biographies page which seems to be a bunch of odd looking guys with weird facial hair, but it's a neat thing for locals to look through.
posted by jessamyn at 7:19 PM on November 26, 2007

Best answer: BookRags has quite a few biographies available - some are free, some are subscriber-only.
posted by lubujackson at 8:59 PM on November 26, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks to both of you for the great links. We should be set for this and a few other projects as well.
posted by snsranch at 5:20 PM on November 27, 2007