Teaching about Women\u27s Lives to Elementary School Children

As sixth-grade teachers with a desire to teach students about the historical role of women in the United States, my colleague and I created a project for use in our classrooms which would maximize exposure to women\u27s history with a minimum of teacher effort. This approach was necessary because of the small amount of time we had available for gathering and organizing material on the history of women and adapting it to the elementary level. Since textbook material on women is practically nonexistent, we decided to have the students use the biographical approach. Each student was to read a biography of an American woman and respond to it in several ways. We gathered biographies from neighboring libraries on reading levels ranging from third to tenth grade (the span of our classes). We made sure that each student had a book which was appropriate for her or his reading level