This is my first post for Bright Ideas and I’m so excited to be a part of it!! This blog hop is all about sharing ideas that will be helpful to you and
your students. It’s tons of great tips at your finger tips. Like an
idea? Pin it so you can come back to it 🙂
My topic for today is all about Author of the Month/Author Studies. Since the day I began teaching I wanted to start an “Author of the Month/Author Study” but I wans’t sure where to begin. All I could think of was to collect books by great authors. It wasn’t until my third year of teaching that everything came together for this idea.
Step 1. Collect books by great authors.
Step 2. Copy and laminate your covers. I scanned them into my computer and printed them out. Don’t
have a color printer? Take them into Kinko’s and copy them there 🙂
Step 3. Put your bulletin board together and add a title. I used my Cricut to create mine.
Step 4. Display some of the books you will be reading by your author wall.
Step 5. Read the books with your kids.
Here is my bulletin board:
Step 6: This is the newest addition to my study. I picked up a blank canvas at Hobby Lobby and used regular acrylic paint to create some custom art for my class. I wasn’t sure how to draw him so I did a quick Google search and found a picture of Pigeon reading a book. I sketched it all out and made sure to incorporate my woodland theme this year by having him sit on a toadstool.
Now do you see the book that Pigeon is holding? He is holding the first book that we are going to be reading as a class! This was my husband’s bright idea.
He suggested I leave the cover blank and switch out the covers to match
my author studies. Wow! An interactive painting?! I never would have thought of that 🙂 I am so excited to see my kids’ reaction when the covers change and I’m especially excited to see what they think about Pigeon reading the
same books as us! I think it’s going to bring our author of the month/author studies to a whole new level. To create these little covers I simply reduced the pictures I printed for my bulletin board to fit into the book cover.
Things I’ve noticed since beginning author of the month/author studies:
*Children become familiar with an author’s work/illustrator’s work and can identify new books by that author/illustrator independently.
*Children become interested in reading more books by the same author.
*They will begin writing about their favorite characters in writer’s workshop.
*They use the bulletin board to write about the books that have not been read yet.
* They have conversations about books and authors with other children! Many will even give recommendations to each other!
Reading our new book by our author of the month is one of the most anticipated times of the day for my class. I hope you found these ideas helpful to start up an author study in your classroom 🙂
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