Seriously... isn't Mo Willems THE MAN? He has such talent and our kids can learn so much from his style, voice and characters. We have been full out in Mo Willems mode during our Books in a Series unit this month. Pigeon was feeling left out so I decided to have him join in on the fun!
On Monday we read aloud Don't Let Pigeon Drive the Bus. Classic! After making some connections to the Elephant and Piggie series, we took a class vote. Would you let the Pigeon drive the bus? Then we followed it up with a review of opinion writing from Susan Jones at Thank God It's First. Her Mo Willems Author Study is fabulous!
This week we have been working on adding character thoughts and dialogue to our own book series in writer's workshop. I love the concept of teaching the "writer" during writer's workshop rather than focusing on the "writing". Therefore I am always looking for other opportunities to teach grammar and punctuation. Plus... how many times can our littles use "said" in a story. "He said, she said, he said, she said.... " Miss. Vaz said, "Find another way to say SAID." :) Soooooo, I used my shared writing block to create a shared list of different ways to write a dialogue tag AND I even threw in there some proper dialogue punctuation. They LOVED coming up with different ways the Pigeon "said" the speech bubbles in the book.
After some dialogue practice, we worked on Pigeon thoughts. Some of theirs cracked me up... they are so COMICal! Ha.. I crack myself up!
Then I made the hall pretty with all our hard work!!!
Tomorrow we are going to make Pigeon hats! I'm SO EXCITED!
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