Did You Know? - a GREAT activity to write about facts learned!

A friend of mine, Carol Mebane, who has been an excellent teacher for a long time shared an activity with me a while back when I taught second grade that works just as well for first graders. The activity is called "Did You Know?" After studying about a famous person, such as Martin Luther King Jr., students draw a portrait of the person and write statements beginning with "Did you know..." The number of statements they write is unlimited, the portraits are so cute, and this assignment can serve as an alternative assessment. In my class, we did a circle map to activate prior knowledge (schema), read books, watched Streaming Videos, and built a flow-map (time line) of his life.