Monday, March 14, 2011
Author Study Sharing
Share with the group why you chose this author and why you believe the materials associated with this author will be appropriate for the age group targeted. Include what age students you are planning for and what your focus of instruction will be. For example: "I have chosen Lester Laminack and will focus on his descriptive language to help my third graders notice how he uses words to help me picture in my head and add interest to the story. I want the children to use his writing to guide them in a narrative story that they will be writing."
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Post from Cathy S: (I posted the new discussion area after she had posted this on the original author discussion and I wanted to be sure people saw it here!) After browsing webpages, i have decided to definitely do Dav Pilkey for my author study. his Big Dog, Little Dog series for toddlers have long been among my favorites, as have his Dragon chapter books (pre-k-2nd) and his Captain Underpants series is generally a huge hit with newly independent readers. My son's all time favorite bedtime book was another by Pilkey, a poem of a book called When Cats Dream.
ReplyDeletenow i just need to decide what age group my lesson will target...
I have decided to change my author from Jan Brett to Lois Ehlert. I saw that someone else was doing Jan Brett so I thought I would find someone new. Lois Ehlert is also an author/illustrator who creates beautiful art. Her books are usually related to nature in some way and she uses collage to illustrate her books. I am thinking that I will use her books to create a lesson around rhyming words and color word vocabulary for Kindergarten. I will also include an activity using Ehlert's style of collage art so the kids can experience how Ehlert creates her pictures. I have just not decided which of her books that I will use yet.
ReplyDeleteI already did an author study about Mercer Mayer this year, but I wanted to choose one no body else chose. Ss=o I also have been looking at Eric Carle and I am going to begin to look at Leo Lionni, I know Im spelling it wrong, but bothare beautiful wellknown authors and their writing is predictable and their jpictures are so brilliant. Perfect for PreK.
ReplyDeleteI am going to do my author study on Karma Wilson. Her Bear series are great books to talk about friendship/caring and giving and also rhyming words which is very appropriate for preschool. We are always talking about being good friends and showing each other we care. This series has the same characters through out so it would be great to do a comparison between the books. I would be able to extend this author study into our farm unit also by introducing the books Beautiful Babies, The Cow Loves Cookies, and Sakes Alive: A Cattle Drive.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to learning more about each of these authors! It would be great to have a few people present their study on the 2nd. If you are ready to present (you can finish the written piece before our last class) please let me know or post it right here!
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteAs I communicated to Lindy, I would like to present on April 2nd. I have decided to do my author study on Mo Willems. He has written books like Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus, Edwina The Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct, and the Elephant and Piggie books. I love Mo Willems, because children love Mo Willems. His stories are wonderfully interactive. His text is simple and often repetitive and so it easy for children to attend to the text during read aloud, and because of this after a few sample readings children can “read” the books to each other. In addition Mo Willems uses a lot of expressive dialogue in his stories and this lends well to a discussion about periods, exclamation points, questions, and other features of text. Mo Willems also had simple drawings that are easy for children to copy. He is a great author to study for children writing their own books. For my author study children have gotten to know Mo Willems. We read many of his books, did literary theater with his stories, looked up details about his life on his web page. The final project we did on Mo Willems, was to draw and paint our favorite Mo Willems book, and write Mo Willems a letter. This serves to underscore that writing has meaning, and Mo Willems will read our letters and look at our pictures and write us back…hopefully ☺
I would be happy to present my project this Saturday.
ReplyDeleteI chose Maurice Sendak in part,because I recently came across a book that he illustrated that I loved as a child entitled, What Do You Say, Dear?, which I wanted to share with first graders. Also, Where the Wild Things Are is one of my favorite books. A few years back Sendak was interviewed on NPR and he was really intriguing to me, so I wanted to learn more about him. He has authored/illustrated over 100 books and his work is appropriate for a wide range of ages. Much of his work involves fantasy and whimsy which is perfect for young children; yet, there is always a pertinent message. In my author lesson I focused on making predictions, concepts of print,belonging to a literary community (participating in discussions about text) and writing a response to literature which included drawing and writing in a similar style as the author. For my project, I chose five additional books, summarized them and offered sugestions for lessons with first graders.
I switched from Rosemary Wells to Martin Waddell. I have been looking at his characters as ways of teaching inference and predicting since that is what the first graders that I am working with are learning right now. I think it is kind of neat that he has written for older kids as well. There is not a lot of info that I have been able to dig up on him as a person except for an article when he was nominated for an award, but for first graders that may be enough. I am also interested in the variety of illustrators that he has worked with. I think that shows great versatility in the stories, and that they would all be so appealing with such different illustrators, says to me that the writing is well done, not just the pictures.
ReplyDeleteI am sticking with Jan Brett, although it has been difficult to choose one author. Jan Brett’s books have beautiful illustrations and endearing characters. The main illustrations connect to the words on the page but the illustrations on the bottom and/or sides of each page tell another part of the story or give clues to what is coming next. Jan Brett’s stories are fun to act out and there are so many ideas for art projects. She also has a fantastic web site with activities for all sorts of things from making masks of the animals in her books to coloring sheets and celebrations.
ReplyDeleteI decided to do my author study on Audrey Wood for my age 3-5 pre-school classroom. Her illustrations and text are engaging and funny, it is easy for the children to become comfortable with her stories quickly and "read" them confidently. Many of her stories, such as "Silly Sally" and "The Deep Blue Sea" are rhyming books, which would make the concept of rhyme introduction fun and easy. It is also easy to use her work, such as in Silly Sally, to work with initial sounds in words. Adding the letter /s/ to the beginning of a child's name is a fun way to play with the sounds in words and to add and delete phonemes (such as "Silly Saren went to town" instead of "Silly Karen...").
ReplyDeleteI am working on Audrey Wood as her book Silly Sally is one of my son's favorites and I decided I wanted to find other books by her. Audrey has written a few books that have repetitive text for the child to engage in. I am focusing on the Preschool age for my lesson. I am currently trying to find where my son hid the CD that goes with Silly Sally. It has different sound effects that the children love and he doesn't want me to take the CD to school as he could listen to it every day!
ReplyDeleteI have chosen to do an author study for my preschoolers and the kindergarteners at my practicum site. Mercer Mayer's Little Critter books are very popular in my classroom. The children can relate to Little Critter. They enjoy his silly mishaps and find the illustrations comical. They also love to find the mouse, spider and grasshopper that accompany him on every page. Mercer Mayer also writes other wonderful books, such as "There's an Alligator Under my Bed."
ReplyDeleteI have used Mercer Mayer's books to help inspire my students to write stories about there own experiences. The Little Critter books, especially, are about real life experiences that all kids can relate to. We have read many Little Critter books and then related his adventures to our own lives through discussions and journal entries. We wrote our own "Just Me and My Friend" stores. Some children like to do some of the same things with their friends that Little Critter likes to do with his.
For my lesson plan connected to the GEs we read, "There's an Alligator Under My Bed." We stopped and made predictions (by drawing pictures and writing /scribing) about what the boy will do about the alligator. After we finished the story we talked about our predictions and compared them to what actually happened.
Mercer Mayer also has a great interactive website with games, printables, and videos of Mercer himself singng or reading his books aloud. We have used this website a lot and let the children explore it during Free Play.
I will use
I used Leo Lionni for my author study. His illustrations are comparable to Eric Carle's and his stories use a variety of vacabulary. His stories have a moral and are easy for children to relate to. Also, the books make it very easy to add a culminating activity.
ReplyDeleteNicole says:
ReplyDeleteI wil be looking at Denise Fleming, author and illustrator of In the Small, Small Pond and In the Tall, Tall Grass as well as her books about Buster the dog. I chose Denise Fleming becuase it was suggested as an author study in Literacy Beginnings by Fountas and Pinnell for pre-k students and I was interested in looking at the artist side of an author too. So far the students really enjoy her work, especially the stories about Buster.