November is one of my favorite months to teach because of Election Day, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. However, after Thanksgiving comes one of my favorite units to teach. I absolutely love Jan Brett. She is an amazing author and illustrator. Each year I have taught I have done an author study using some of her books as a whole class project.
I take about two weeks to compete the author study and try to read one book each day. After we have read five of the books I have my students write a summary for one of the books with their table group. There is a graphic organizer in their packet to help organize their thoughts and then I give them chart paper and a marker to write their group's final draft.After the summaries, I have the students do a character analysis. They choose one character from one of the books and draw a picture of him/her in the middle. They then write different things about the character around the outside of the picture.
The next big thing that I do is read The Mitten by Jan Brett and then read The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt and the students compare and contrast the two stories. Once we have read both stories I allow the students to write their own mitten stories. I cut out large mittens from construction paper and have the students decorate them as the cover to their stories.
The last thing we do is make a graph of our favorite Jan Brett books as a class. I choose five of the books and have the students pick their favorite.
The mitten stories, summaries, and graph all go into the hallway as a display for the month of December. (I seem to have never taken a picture of this display so I will try to do that and update this post in the next few weeks.)
I have made a packet that goes with the author study that can be found by clicking here!
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