As we regularly Skype with Mrs. Obach’s Grade 1 class (now her Grade 2 class as she has looped with this fabulous bunch of learners), we knew that they were passionately interested in reading Mo Willems’ pigeon books. When they decided to write their own pigeon books in the style of Mo Willems’, we followed with interest and learned alongside them as they investigated copyright rules for using an author/illustrator’s character. We were excited for them when they were granted permission by Mo Willems to create their own pigeon stories! Our first day of senior kindergarten began with one of our Grade 2 friends sharing her pigeon story, and with that the pigeon craze came home to roost in Oak Lake Community School’s senior kindergarten program! Since the first day, we have enjoyed one or two pigeon stories each day from our Grade 2 guest authors via Skype, and we’ve adapted the project to suit our kindergarten interests and abilities. Here’s what we’ve been up to!
Reading and exploring: we’ve read every single one of Mo Willems’ pigeon books MANY times. We’ve examined how the author uses speech and thought bubbles, hearts, different kinds of text, and punctuation. We’ve watched a number of YouTube adaptations of Mo Willems’ books…some definitely better than others. This one is our favourite!
We also graphed our favourite Mo Willems’ pigeon title on the SMART Board. Here’s the slide if you’d like to use it.
Learning to use speech and thought bubbles: after discussing the speech and thought bubbles in Mo Willems’ books, I taught a mini-lesson on why and how to use speech and thought bubbles in writing. To make it more fun, we added speech bubbles and used different kinds of text (and hearts) to a few pictures of us.
Don’t forget about the duckling: next the students insisted that we learn to draw the duckling. We explored a few tutorials on YouTube, but eventually just referred to Mo Willems’ illustrations. The results were equally impressive, and we had a gallery walk to share our work!
Setting up our writing centre: now that we are eager to develop our own pigeon and duckling stories, we wanted to have a special place in our classroom to do so. Today we set up our writing centre. We’ve included these supplies so far: blank booklets for writing stories, clipboards and paper, writing materials (markers, pencils, crayons, erasers), and an alphabet linking chart. We were excited to get started during centre time today!
We’ll keep you posted!