Mo Willems Author Study

This month marks the start of our Books in a Series unit. In reader's workshop students select a series of their choice to explore in book clubs, while also creating and writing adventures about a realistic fiction character of their own in writer's workshop. What better author to use for mentor texts than the one and only, Mo Willems?! His work is dreamy (insert heart eye emoji here)!

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I consistently choose his work each year to guide my students to explore all the potential there is with author's craft of such few words and pictures. In reader's workshop I use the Elephant and Piggie series during my mini-lessons and look to the Pigeon series in shared reading.

As a culminating project, we make these sweet Pigeon headbands that make you go googley eyed at the first sight of them! I had seen them on students while watching Mo Willems speak at an elementary school at the end of one of the Knuffle Bunny DVDs. I am having a hard time locating where you can find the DVD. I took it out at my local library. You can find Knuffle Bunny, Knuffle Bunny Too, and Knuffle Bunny Free on Amazon by clicking the book titles.

With this particular craft, I chose to precut the pieces for the students. I got very lucky that the blue paper and blue sentence strips that I had laying around happened to be the very same shade. Unfortunately I do not happen to know the brand of either. However, I have selected two online that I believe to be the closest match. The bright blue in the Astrobrights "bright" assortment pack gives you a great option!

Students glued all the pieces for the Pigeon face.

Once they were finished gluing, they came to me to assemble the "neck and body." I chose to staple these pieces in effort to save time. One staple to attach two white strips to the head. Then I separated the strips and attached one to each side of the "body."

One tip- the longer the white strip, the more likely the pigeon head will lean to one side. I chose to keep them short to prevent this from happening!

The body was a blue sentence strip. I did my best to match up the sentence strip color and found this multicolor neon pack from Carson Dellosa on Amazon. I measured each students head before attaching the Pigeon head.

I have also seen teachers incorporating curriculum needs by adding writing to the sentence strip. Student can practice adding dialogue tags to what Pigeon says in his speech bubbles. This is the perfect way to incorporate dialogue punctuation as well. Then students can write the whole sentence including the dialogue tag on their sentence strip.