Biography.com has a nice variety of fairly short biographies (written in English) of twelve different people from Spanish-speaking countries. For a writing activity, I had my students choose two and summarize them in Spanish. My directions were to include
- Where and when the person was born
- Where s/he lives (or lived)
- Something about his/her personal life (one-two sentences)
- Why s/he is famous (two-three sentences)
- When s/he died (if applicable)
Easy peasy! I like having the students read in English but write summaries in Spanish because it prevents them from just copying chunks from the original text, as is their habit.
