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!
Sign up to snag these!
Receive all these classroom management tools right to your inbox!