Tzemach Class 2016: Mo Willems Author Study

Hello family and friends!

It's been a short but fun week in the Tzemach class! After several weeks of exploring blocks, we noticed the kids taking an interest in our books by Mo Willems. So, this week we decided to do an author study on him. Throughout an author study we read books by the author, talked about the different parts of a book, discussed the writing process that authors go through, and discussed what we like (and don't like) about the author's writing style. It's a time for us to discover more books but also a time for us to relate reading to our real life experiences. We chose Mo Willems because the kids LOVE his books. If you haven't heard of him then I encourage you to check out some of his books at the library. We read many books in these series: Elephant and Piggie, Pigeon, and Knuffle Bunny. Our class' favorite series of his seems to be the Elephant and Piggy collection. The books are funny but also teach us some valuable lessons. In this series the author uses text bubbles to show dialogue. The grey bubbles represent the elephant and the pink ones represent the pig. As we read through these books, we noticed the text was different from many other read alouds we've done. He makes some words huge to represent a loud reading and some words small to represent the opposite. We learned that you can tell a lot about how a character feels by the way the text looks. Even if we didn't yet know a word, we could still tell the tone that the word should be read in.

To start our study we read all the Mo Willems books we could find. We talked about the characters, their feelings, and their importance to the stories. We talked about the purpose of an author and illustrator, as well as the tone the author uses when he writes. We also learned that some books can be funny! We had a great time laughing through these books and talking about the feelings of the characters and what events they went through. After we read several different series, we made a chart of our favorites. We each wrote our name on a piece of chart paper until our favorite set of books.. As we voted we told everyone what we liked about that book and why it was our favorite.

After spending time learning about the parts of a book and the writing process, we decided to write our own stories. We let the kids take complete liberty with what they wrote. They picked the genre, characters, and story line. We sat down with each child individually and talked them through the process. We started with talking out our storyline and what our characters were going to be. Next, we drew pictures of what was happening in our story. After getting our story on paper through illustrations, we thought of a title and completed our front covers. Most of the class wanted Michelle and I to write the words out so we went back through the story with them and wrote word for word what they told us. Some of the kids chose to write a few words of their own. I noticed some of them writing words really small or really big. When I asked why they chose to write the words that way, they informed me that they were writing like Mo Willems. They really put some thought into these books and they look great! Take some time to read them in the hallway...our little authors are awesome!

We also spent some time this week putting on a puppet show! We printed off an elephant and piggy characters and glued them to popsicle sticks. We decided to use our long table as a stage and 2 kids at a time took turns hiding behind the table and used their puppet to tell a story. Some of the partners chose to retell a Mo Willems story while others chose to make up their own story together. This time was too funny. The kids LOVED it! The audience was cracking up as elephant and piggy went on all kinds of crazy adventures. As you can guess, most of our stories were full of silliness!

We told the kids that we would continue to read plenty of Mo Willems books throughout the rest of the year. If you have any at home or find some at the library, please bring them in. We'd love to read some new ones!

Love,
Ms. Rachael

Approaches to Learning

Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.

Social & Emotional

Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
Participate in group life of class.
Develop friendship with one or town preferred children.
Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.

Language & Literacy

Carry out simple directions and directives.
Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
Combine some letters with pretend writing.
Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.

Mathematics

Organize and represent data with real objects.
Compare the lengths of two objects.
Understand and use positional words to describe the location of objects.
Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.

Enjoying our Mo Willems books!