Diving Into Author Study: William Steig and Bill Peet
My students need 27 pairs of books by high-quality, thought provoking children's authors so they can study authors' craft in pairs during Readers' Workshop. Titles include "Caboose Who Got Loose," "Encore for Eleanor," and "Buford the Little Bighorn."
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
Have you ever fallen in love with an author so much you wanted to read everything he or she has ever written? My students fall in love with books and authors all the time, but our classroom limited classroom book collection has them constantly begging me make another trip to the public library.
My students are an inquisitive, brilliant, and inspiring group of second graders whose voracious appetite for books is fortunately difficult to satiate.
Second grade is a wonderful stage in their literacy journey. They delight in using the perfect word on the playground; they break into giggles while whisper-reading a funny book; they become obsessed with any topic, author, or theme that is put in front of them. Simply put, they are a joy.
They attend DC Prep Public Charter School in Washington, DC, a school relentlessly focused on providing a path to college to students from a community where a high-quality education has proven elusive. DC Prep emphasizes academic rigor in concert with character education, aiming to produce scholars whose brilliance is matched by their integrity.
My Project
I am requesting multiple copies of picture books by two of the most engaging and beloved authors my students encounter: William Steig and Bill Peet. This addition to our classroom library will enable students to study these brilliant authors' craft deeply and collaboratively. During a Readers' Workshop unit on William Steig, for instance, two students can independently read "Brave Irene", and during sharing time discuss how the themes of family and growing up connect to Sylvester and the Magic Pebble from the read-aloud. Students can record their favorite Bill Peet Vocabulary in their reading journals, and use those words when they write their own adventure-fantasy stories in Writers' Workshop. Multiple copies of these texts will allow my students to read and write collaboratively over shared texts, and these authors' prolificacy will enable the whole class to engage in an author study unit without having to keep in lock-step on the same text.
All students deserve to be immersed in rich, meaningful, imaginative literature.
Supporting this project will enable a group of book-hungry kids, at a pivotal point in the development of their reading lives, to dive even deeper into the joy of reading, the craft of writing, and the abiding love of words. It's that kind of richly literate life that will sustain their curiosity far beyond second grade -- to college, and beyond!
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