Summer's Author Study

Summer school is geared toward children who is going to kindergarten. We decided that the children can handle a more challenging theme so we had children favorite author's study. We picked two children's book's authors, Mo Willems & Kevin Henkes. The first few weeks of summer schools we read Mo Willems several series. The last half of the summer, we're studying Kevin Henkes' books. Our pretend center was a café, where children can ordered food from a menu, prepared café food such as cupcakes, cookies, cakes & sandwich. We also had juice and coffee makers for children to serve to each other. In our writing center, we had more challenging activities for children to do such as alliteration and letter sounds cards, simple three words reading cards and math game where children counted and choose which one was more also which one doesn't belong. When the days were incredibly hot, we did yoga inside and check out their seriousness in doing it through the pictures. The art works that was hung around our classroom were all related to the books that we read. When we read "The Pigeon Wants a Puppy", we asked the children what other things that the pigeon might want. They came up with alien, dragon, elephant even another pigeon. They got to dress up their "Naked Mole Rats" when we read that book and some dress them up as princess, superheroes and even the hulk. For "Knuffle Bunny," we mixed the reality pictures of our playground, the bus and the classroom with the children's illustration. There's a child who drew all the things in the classroom that was not in the pictures, the hulk playing in the playground, a unicorn who came out of the bus and many more interesting interpretations. For Mo Willems' Elephant & Piggie's "We are in a book", we made a book with words bubbles and they came up with interesting stories such as Cinderella & Rapunzel, Batman vs bad guys and more. At the end of Mo Willems series, we voted which one of the series were their favorite. When we read "A Weekend With Wendel," Wendel use peanut butter and jelly to draw things on the table cloth so we did the same thing but on paper instead. Then when we learned that Wemberly has a stuffed animal named petals on "Wemberly Worried," we made our own stuffed animals and named them. They came our with very interesting name such as A Very Ghost, Sister the Snake, Fox the Bear, Stinky the Jelly Fish and much more. The last four Kevin Henkes' books that we read, we also made a poster where we discuss about who the characters in the story, where the setting is, what's the problems in the story and what the solutions to the problems. The children showed remarkable understanding of the story. We are all very impressed. Of course, we voted on which Kevin Henkes' character was our favorite. Check out the pictures!!

The books we read this theme are ...