A Memory That Takes the Cake

We studied Patricia Polacco last month for our author study.( Which is why those books are on our Shelfari- pretty cool huh? Thats all thanks to Erica, one of the Kindergarten teachers at my school, as she had one on her blog and I thought it was so great I just had to have one too!) If  you look closely you can tell that we have moved on to Robert Munsch now as his books are lining the ledge. :) But better late than never.


I have been much better about doing author studies this year, like I mentioned back in my Tomie Depaola post, ( you can read that <a href="http://www.mrsrobinson2ndgrade.blogspot.com/2011/09/kiddos-celebrate-strega-nona.html">HERE</a> ) and wanted to find good resources for some other authors that didn't have a Scholastic book. I am not quite ready to start creating my own things but I knew where I could find people who were, so I turned to Teachers Pay Teachers. That is where I found this Patricia Polacco author study packet.



It was created by Hope King and currently is listed on Teachers Pay Teachers for only $5! ( Small tangent, one of the things I love about that site is that teachers who use it have really priced their items to SELL! A book like this would go for 12- 16 bucks in a catalogue or bookstore. ) It had pages to make an anchor chart/intro poster about Patricia, it had activities for a ton of her books, and it also had an author study student journal for the students. I really felt like my kiddo's got alot out of this author study. They really did some quality work. You can get your own copy of this here ( http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/A-Spotlight-on-Patricia-Polacco-An-Author-Study) .

The activity that I put on our Work We Love Board was something we did after reading the book Thunder Cake. It was such perfect timing when we started this author study because we happened to be doing personal narratives as our writing focus. Reading her books, which are almost all personal narrative, really helped my kiddo's to understand PN in a much better way.

One of the things they noticed while reading all these stories was that Patricia likes to put actual photo's of her family members in the "frames" in her illustrations. So before they started writing, I sent home a note asking for parents to help their child choose a picture of a memory that was special to them. When they brought the photo in I made a black and white copy so it would look like the black and white photo's in her books. Then I put black construction paper "tabs" on them. After they had their picture they did a first copy on handwriting paper and a self edit before I gave them the color copy. All in all this activity took them 2-3 writing sessions of about 20- 30 minutes each. 

 It is about time for them to come down but they worked so hard on them ,and I loved that they had their own photo's and memories to share with their friends, that I wanted to leave them up for awhile.