For years in second grade, I looked forward to our little study of the “Mr. Putter and Tabby” series. It was a perfect extension for teaching friendship.
So I knew I wanted to bring that love up to third grade. But I had to grow it up, somehow…
I had to make it “big kid” friendly. Let’s be honest… most of her books are perfect for emergent readers… not my BIG third graders.
So… I came up with the idea of doing an author study! Most of Ms. Rylants books are easy to read, so we could read LOTS of her books during the week AND she has LOTS of different types of books so interest levels and reading levels could be easily matched!
And can I just say… the kiddos LOVED it! Like seriously people, L.O.V.E.D it.
To start off the week, I had the kiddos do a quick write in their Reading Response Journals on why they thought authors write and where they thought author’s got their ideas from.
I loved hearing their ideas. Most of them were on the right path… authors used their imagination and wrote for kids to enjoy their stories (I’ll take that!)
So then we dived into Cynthia Rylant and some of her stories. We read the first book in her “Henry and Mudge” series and then I had students do a quick retell using a story map. You can grab the story map we used for FREE here in my TpT Store…
Next, we read the first “Mr. Putter and Tabby” book. We started looking closely at both book series and verbally discussed the similarities with our shoulder partners. I almost LEPT for joy when a few of my kiddos found the friendship connection and the types of friends Cynthia liked to write about! (More on that in a minute!) After their little chat, I sent students back to their seats to write about the similarities and differences using this graphic organizer.
We continued our comparisons in center time as well. Here, you can see my aspiring font creator compared “In Puddle Trouble” and “Walk the Dog”… Oh that Zeke!
They were seriously soooo cute -I mean- responsible! Making sure everyone could see the pictures.
It seemed like the ” Henry and Mudge” and “Mr. Putter and Tabby” books were a crowd pleaser!
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I adore Cynthia Rylant, and I also own EVERY SINGLE RESOURCE you listed in this post! How would you scale this down if you were back with 2nd graders?
Hey Michelle!
I love that you have everything in this post! This would be so easy to scale down with 2nd graders! I would just model a WHOLE lot more and do a lot of "thinking aloud". For example, after reading two text, I had the kiddos compare the two stories on their own. For 2nd grade, I would do a class collaboration of comparison using an interactive anchor chart. I would also limit the number of books you shared. Too much reading can overwhelm emergent readers with too much information. I'd probably just read one Henry and Mudge, One Mr. Putter and Tabby and a few of her mountain stories. I would use these as your basis for comparison and scaffold the thinking. Hope this helps! It was such a great unit and the kiddos were TOTALLY into it!
Leigh, It looks like none of the pictures are showing up in your Cynthia Rylant author study. Can't want to see them! Great site!!
Hello Rachel! I'm looking at this post right now and I am not having an issue with the pics? Are you viewing this at school? I know sometimes schools limit pictures with their security settings. Thanks for stopping by!