If your school is named for someone, especially someone who is not famous outside your community, finding out the story behind the name can be an engaging project for your students' first experience as biographers. Let them work as a group and share information. Hold a press conference with someone who knew your subject or a representative of your local historical society or school board. Discuss ahead of time what questions the children want to ask but give them free rein during the event. Record the press conference for reference when you write up your findings.
Start the students off on separating fact from fiction with a biography from a song, poem or short story, such as "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" written for the Disney TV show. In as short a span as the first verse of that song, you can help students differentiate between verifiable facts -- "Born on a mountain top in Tennessee" -- opinion -- "Greenest state in the land of the free" -- legendary claims -- "Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three" -- and metaphorical characterizations -- "King of the wild frontier."
It may be best to take students, as a group, into their first experience with reading a detailed nonfiction book. Have students, individually or as a group, record what they know about the subject before reading and what questions they have about the subject that they hope will be answered in the book. As you read the book, have students raise their hands when they hear an answer and record it before you go on. After reading, help the students brainstorm additional questions that occurred to them and where they might look for answers.
Assemble a number of fictional, biographical, autobiographical and general descriptive resources about a single class of subjects, such as Native Americans or U.S. presidents. Allow each student or small group to choose which resource to use and report back to the class. Focus on how to tell which resources fit which classification and, if possible, demonstrate that an entertaining format, such as a graphic narrative, isn't always fictional.