In PNA, our curriculum is geared towards developing emotional intelligence, effective communication skills, and influential leadership. In third grade, students have been reading narrative nonfiction, specifically biographies, texts about real people who have done remarkable things. Many of these people have changed the world but just like everyone, they also faced adversity. Students, then, start to consider how they themselves deal with adversity.

Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, says that kids need grit; in biographies, students see models of people with grit. They can see how others handle setbacks and still push themselves to stay determined. And, biographies can teach about more than the one subject of the text. We read to learn not only about the one person the book is about but also the group of people that person represents and the groups of people on whom that person made an impact. That is, we read biography not only to learn about specific famous figures, but also to learn about the world in which we live and the world in which we want to live.