Author as Mentor/Voice

Author as Mentor: A lesson using Voice with Paul Galdone

The Story:

An this irresistible children's classic, Galdone gives a new generation of readers a large scale, entertaining look at Little Wee Bear, Middle-Sized Bear, Great Big Bear, and one of our favorite story time characters: Goldilocks! Graphically interesting, the text appears respectively sized in "Little Wee," "Middle-Sized" and "Great Big" characters, cleverly differentiating each bear's speech.

Young audiences will delight in this tale of how a little girl named Goldilocks takes pleasure in making herself at home — in the bears' home, that is! The text is light and humorous, and this book presents educators with a large, brightly illustrated visual to read to multitudes of interested listeners at one time. An old tale redone with contemporary charm, this book is definitely a "Great Big" winner to add to any child's collection of classic storybooks.

Standard/Benchmark/Indicator

•                With assistance, identify first-person point of view;

•                With assistance, make connections to self, other texts, and/or the world;

With assistance, write friendly letters following an established format.

The concept focus is how Voice changes as one takes on a new persona.

The Lesson: 1 week

1.    Read the traditional story and discuss the voices of each character.

2.     Have students practice changing their voice to Baby Bear, Mama, and PaPa.

3.     Read another version of “The Three Bears.” Compare VOICE.

4.     As Model Letter writing to students. Do this together.

5.     As a class decide what character will write a letter to Goldilocks, MaMa, PaPa, or Baby? Work together to determine the character’s voice.

6.     Then have students write their own letters to Goldilocks, taking on the persona of one of the three bears. Differentiate instruction have some students write their letters entirely on their own. Provide others with guides to assist.


Related Read Aloud Stories/Poems

Focus Story: The Three Bears by Paul Galdone
Companion Story: The Three Bears Songbook. by Robert McCracken
Companion Rhyme: Peas Porridge Hot

The Three Bears by Jan Brett
The Silly Story of Goldie Locks and The Three Squares by Grace MacCarone
Goldilocks and the Three Hares by Heidi Petach
It's the Bear! by Jez Alborough
Bear's Dream by Janet Slingsby
The Big Bears
We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosin
Ten in the Bed by Mary Rees
The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood
Too Big, Too Small, Just Right by Frances Minters

About the Author:
Paul Galdone was born circa 1907 in Budapest, Austria- Hungary and immigrated to the United States in 1921. Galdone studied art at the Art Student's League and New York School for Industrial Design. He served in World War II in the U.S. Army, Engineers. The author and illustrator of children's books also was employed as a bus boy, electrician's helper, and fur dryer, in addition to four years in the art department at Doubleday (NY). His work was awarded runner up for the Caldecott Medal (Eve Titus, Anatole, 1957 and Anatole and the Cat, 1958) and selection by the American Library Association for notable books (The Little Red Hen, Winter Danger, and Flaming Arrows). He died of a heart attack on 7 November 1986, in Nyack, NY.

Other Works:

Activities for Developing Voice

1) Either alone or with a friend, go to a local restaurant, cafe, or fast food chain. Take in not only food, but also atmosphere. Later, write your own review in a voice that approximates the ambience of the restaurant. (Hickey 61)

2) Listen to your favorite music artist. Describe his or her voice. Begin by listing the personality features of the speaker you hear as you listen. Then, try to support your list by identifying the language habits or combination of habits that seem to give rise to those features. It will be helpful to find the song's written words on the tape, cd, or Internet. Consider these elements, for example:

1. Level of vocabulary.
2. Predominance of multi syllabic or monosyllabic words
3. Number of sentences ending on monosyllabic words, especially hard-consonant-ended words
4. Frequency of simple sentences or complex sentences
5. Frequency of sentence fragments
6. Average sentence length (number of words). Does this speaker depend on mostly short or long sentences?
7. Length variation: varied a lot or a little? In a representative paragraph, mark the ends of sentences with a slash mark. Read the paragraph aloud. What does the rhythm of sentences tell you about the speaker?
8. Punctuation. Does the speaker rely much on punctuation within a sentence -
interruptions, lists, clauses joined by semicolons? If so, read these sentences out loud. How does the intonation pattern created by internal punctuation contribute to the voice.
References:
http://books.google.com/books?id=oOMXh9TsiRwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Paul+galdone+The+Three+Bears&source=bl&ots=ePkI8U_zG-&sig=bSJrVgTFijj2Hd585_2KQFeYx7M&hl=en&ei=DgSATcy9Gqiw0QHsyaGKCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false


http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/Galdone/MSS19990041.html




Extension Activities:
http://www.arkansas.gov/childcare/services/printedmats/pdf/story/threebears.pdf
http://www.thevirtualvine.com/3bears.html

Author as Mentor/Conventions

Author as Mentor: Lesson using Conventions

Cat's Colors  

by Jane Cabrera 


About the Story:
Cat’s Colors, by Jane Cabrera, is a pleasurable discovery of a kitten’s colorful adventures for children who enjoy bright pictures and a short, enchanting tale. The author’s first attempt at children’s literature, Cat’s Colors is a delightful book conceived to introduce young readers to several colors, as well as reinforce color recognition and enhance their understanding of how these colors relate to things around them.

Within its thirty-two colorfully fun pages, an orange and black striped kitten first asks readers, “ What is my favorite color?” Cat then suggests ten colors throughout his tale, introducing youngsters to green, pink, black, red, yellow, purple, brown, blue, white, and orange. One minor caveat: the color variations of red and orange are fairly similar, not completely distinguishing one from the other as is expected in a color concept book such as this one.

Introducing each color as a question, Cat immediately follows each query with a sentence describing his association to it, as well as a pictured illustration that lends itself to the child’s color concept of the world around the kitten and himself. Throughout this children’s tale, the reader is taken through the author’s palette of colors while trying to guess which one is Cat’s personal favorite, and why.

It is a simple story, with a heartwarmingly purrr-fect ending, sure to bring a smile to your little ones' faces. At the end of this short tale, Cat will reveal that his favorite color is orange, the color of his mother. 
“Is it Green? Green is the grass where I like to walk.” 

Conventions  The concept focus is Conventions as high frequency words. It is imperative for kindergartners to read and write high frequency words with ease. In this lesson, key high frequency words are practiced over and over.

Standards/Benchmark/Indicators:

•   Identify and use letter sounds including blending sounds.

•   Use high frequency words and environmental print to read.

•   Draw or write in response to information.

•   Draw or write with teacher assistance to communicate.

Materials:

Chart paper, marking pens, correction tape, construction paper.

Anticipatory Set: Discuss with students any other books they have read or we have read as a class that talk about color.

Lesson: 1-3 days-Voice/Shared Writing

1.   Read the story with students.

2.   Ask students to make connections with colors in their world.

3.   Share with the class or small table group and discuss.

4.   Make a class list of things that are associated with specific colors.

5.   Decide on a color as a class to start a big class book.

6.   Each day choose two colors to write about interactively until class book is finished.

7.   Use high frequency words to establish a pattern within a sentence on each page.

8.   Example: (____ is for ___.) By modeling this idea in interactive writing, students will be more successful independently. Example: Red is for a stop sign. Orange is for a carrot. Yellow is for the sun. Green is for a turtle. Blue is for the ocean. Purple is for a flower.

About the Author-http://www.flickr.com/people/janecabrera/

Born July 30, 1968, in Berkhamsted, England; daughter of Bernard and Jill Johnson; married Julian Cabrera (a writer and disc jockey), August 29, 1995. Education: Watford College of Art, higher national diploma (in graphic design; with distinction). Politics: "Green." Hobbies and other interests:Environmental activism, travel, nature crafts, mural painting, cooking, country walks, socializing with friends.

Extension Activities:

Colors, We Love You

Red, we love you. Yes, we do. Apples, berries And cherries too.

Orange we love you. Yes, we do. Pumpkin, juice, And carrots too.

Yellow we love you. Y es, we do. Bananas, sun, And lemons too.

http://www.makewayforbooks.org/pdfs/CatsColors_guide.pdf

Other books by this author

Reference:

http://www.writingfix.com/6_Traits/Primary/Writing_Rainbows.htm

Author as Mentor: Ideas

The Squiggle by Carole Lexa Schaefer

Author as Mentor-6 trait lesson on Ideas

Ideas – The concept focus is Ideas as a squiggle. Ideas can come from anywhere and you can, in turn, write about anything. The squiggle allows us to challenge our minds for ideas. Standards Addressed: •   With assistance, use prewriting strategies to plan written work; •   With assistance, draw or write sentences that address a single topic. About the Story: This call to creativity shows that rope need not serve a purely functional purpose. Walking with her classmates on a trip to the park, a dark-haired girl finds a flexible length of red cord and begins to shape it into outlines on the sidewalk. Her designs have a Chinese theme: she creates a festival dragon's curving spine, a tightrope for an acrobat who carries a bamboo umbrella, and the angular edge of the Great Wall. She then shows her inventions to her classmates, who had been moving ""in a bunched-up, slow, tight, straight line""; when they take hold of the rope, their procession loosens into a ""squiggle."" Schaefer (In the Children's Garden) adds an aural dimension to the girl's visual game, imagining ""Crack crickle hiss-the sky trail of popping fireworks"" and ""Ripple shhh-the circle of a deep still pool."" Morgan (The Nine Days Wonder) illustrates with calligraphic strokes of marker and gouache on speckly, paper-bag-brown stock. With a few deliberate lines, minimal color and plenty of negative space, he suggests the blank openness onto which the girl projects her ideas. Together, Schaefer and Morgan encourage readers to see that mundane objects hold playful possibilities. Ages 3-7. The Lesson: Used as a center activity to teach students about IDEA Materials: Pre-bound books some with squiggles already on them and some without. Those students without are to make their own squiggles. Anticipatory set: Read the story with students. Use Smartboard Technology and Notebook Software to create a squiggle to provide a model for students. Step 1: Together discuss what creative things the little girl made her string into. Step 2: Students are to use crayons, markers, and or color pencils, anything to help them make their squiggle into a picture. Step 3: Using lines underneath their picture, students are to write a story or explanation to go with the squiggle. Step 4: Students share their stories with their classmates. Extension: Place a paint glob in the center of a folded piece of paper. Have students fold the paper so the paint spreads out. Have students talk about what they see in the paint glob. Have students use their ideas to write a story with a friend.  Other Works: The  Piece

About the Author:

Carole Lexa Schaefer is an award winning children's book author.  She has over twenty picture books and easy readers published with four major publishing companies, and several more titles under contract for publication.

As an educator, as well as an author, Carole is comfortable and experienced in giving presentations of her books and related topics to both children and adults.  In addition to many classroom visits, she has presented to the American Library Association, the Association of American English Teachers, the Conference of Whole Language Teachers, and the International Reading Association.

references: http://www.clschaefer.com/book/14.html

http://writingfix.com/6_Traits/Primary/Squiggles.htm

www.proteacher.com/070038.shtml

http://6traits.cyberspaces.net/mini-ideas.html

The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher-Organization

The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher

Book Title & Author: The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher 

by Molly Bang

Caldecott Honor Book, 1981
Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book for Illustration, 1980
Children's Reviewer's Choice,1980


First published in 1980

About the story:

The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher was my first real book. I had understood that I wanted to be a children's book illustrator, and I understood that the first thing I needed to do was to develop a portfolio showing various styles and also showing several pictures that illustrated the same story. I made some illustrations for the Norwegian tale of Peer Gynt and for several stories and situations I had been thinking about, and by the end of a year, I had enough to take to New York. I visited several publishers, then made another trip and another. I believe it was on the fourth trip that I met with Ursula Nordstrom, one of the great editors of children's books. She looked at the collection of pictures I had brought, and we talked a bit, and she said, "Why don't you make up your own story and illustrate it?"
 to read more…

http://www.mollybang.com/Pages/strawberry.html

Organization Grade Level: Early Elementary (1-3)

Content Standard

Writing Applications

Benchmark 

Write responses to literature that demonstrate an understanding of a literary work.

Indicator 

Write responses to literature that summarize main ideas and significant details and support interpretations with references to the text.

Time frame for lesson: 30 minutes

Supplies:

copy of the book and color overheads

Lesson

1.     Discuss Wordless Books

2.     Show the pictures to the class but do not ask them to make any predictions etc. about the story.

3.     Put first page on the overhead, discuss possible first sentences for the page.

4.     Have students partner up and come up with a first sentence together.

5.     Turn the page and discuss what the author may have been thinking about this page. Have students come up with another sentence about the picture. Share them with the entire class.

6. Repeat this process for each page and discuss as a class.      

About the Author:

My mother met my father when she was a student of medical illustration working on her first job. She was sitting by a (dead) gorilla illustrating his anatomy for the Museum of Natural History. My father was a medical student who walked into the room and fell in love with her at first sight. I was born in Princeton, New Jersey 1943, the second of three children. At the time of my birth, my father was riding a horse in Australia. He was an army doctor in the Pacific during World War II, studying how to protect Allied troops from the tropical diseases that were infecting many of them.

I grew up in Baltimore, where I went to public schools. We spent summers in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a scientific community by the ocean where the fathers and a very few mothers worked in the labs by day and night, and where the children learned to love the land and sea and mostly to avoid science, not realizing that science had infected us even as we rebelled against it.

I went to college at Wellesley and majored in French. After college graduation in 1965, I went to Kyoto, Japan, where I taught English and learned enough Japanese to know that I wanted to explore it much more. After a year and a half, I returned to the U.S. but while waiting to be accepted into a graduate program in Far Eastern studies, I got a job as an interpreter for the (Japanese) Asahi newspaper. This happened just at the time of the first Apollo flights. Through the job, I was able to work and become friends with some of the best Japanese newspaper reporters, travel to parts of the United States that I'd never seen before, and learn something about one of the greatest of human endeavors. I walked inside the vast buildings that housed the rockets and saw them from all angles, got a sense of the developing science of "systems analysis," and sat in the press box as the rocket of the first landing mission shook the ground beneath us as it lifted off for the moon.

I studied Far Eastern Languages and Literatures, first at the University of Arizona and then at Harvard. I received Masters' degrees from both and learned how unsuited I was for scholarly research and a life spent in libraries. I then worked at the Baltimore Sun, where I learned how unsuited I was as a reporter by getting fired. At this low point, two close friends convinced me that I should do what I had always wanted to do: illustrate children's books.

All through the years I was growing up, my parents had given each other copies of books illustrated by the great British illustrator, Arthur Rackham, and I had spent hours and hours of my childhood looking at his pictures. I dreamed that someday I would make pictures as magical and entrancing as his. After working for a year to develop a portfolio, I took my pictures to several publishers in New York. They told me that the illustrations "didn't fit" any writer's writing, and that I should find my own stories. This led to my first books: collections of folktales that I translated or collected, and then illustrated. I have been writing and illustrating, mostly for children, ever since.

My early books were just stories I enjoyed, mostly based on folktales. Once I became a mother, I have been much more influenced by my daughter, Monika. It was because of her that I made Ten, Nine Eight, as well as Dawn, and When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry. And of course I illustrated her series of books about Little Rat.

I've made only a few forays away from children's books. My father became a professor of public health, and I have been interested in this subject all my life. I spent many months in Bangladesh illustrating for UNICEF and for the annual report of a public health program. My ability to speak French, which I had long thought to be useless, helped me get a job as educator for a public health project in French-speaking Mali, West Africa. I spent the year there in 1980-81, writing and illustrating stories containing information on maternal and child health.

At some point, a friend helped me understand that in spite of the growing success of my career, I didn't have a clue how pictures work. As a result, I read as many books as I could about the topic. I then spent a couple of years volunteering in my daughter's public school, trying to help children understand how pictures work, hoping I could thereby learn it myself. Eventually I was able to figure out the most basic principles of picture structure and show how they determine our emotional response—our feeling about a picture. Picture This was the result—my only book for adults, now used in art schools around the country. The first part of Picture This builds, step-by-step, a single illustration from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, showing how each additional piece makes the picture scarier, and again scarier. The rest of the book explains the structural principles that all artists use to make their pictures emotionally powerful.

In the past 10 or 15 years, I have become more concerned about American children's lack of knowledge about even the most basic scientific principles, and I've written four books about science in an attempt to help change this. Even though Common Ground won The Giverny Award for the best children's science book of 2000 and My Light was chosen as an ALA Notable and won the Massachusetts Book Award for Children's Literature in 2005, sales of my science books have been universally dismal. I intend to keep trying.

More about Molly Bang-

http://www.mollybang.com/Pages/bibliography.html

Other Books by this Author:

Extensions/Resources:

http://www.chevroncars.com/learn/arts-culture/grey-lady-strawberry-snatcher

http://books.google.com/books?id=qp5YOIbaML4C&pg=PA48&dq=The+Grey+Lady+and+the+Strawberry+Snatcher%E2%80%8E&lr=#v=onepage&q=The%20Grey%20Lady%20and%20the%20Strawberry%20Snatcher%E2%80%8E&f=false

http://www.mollybang.com/Pages/bibliography.htmlhttp://www.chevroncars.com/learn/arts-culture/grey-lady-strawberry-snatcher

Sentence Fluency "I Was Walking Down the Road."

Walking Down the Road Preview http://www.vidyaonline.org/dl/walkingnew.pdf

A Lesson on Sentence Fluency Using “I Was Walking Down the Road” Sarah E. Barchas and Jack Kent.

The story: Guided Reading Level H, Ages 5-7 year olds

The spirited little girl in this story has a knack for collecting pets. While walking down a road, she catches a toad. While looking for a mitten, she finds a kitten. When she pushes a wheelbarrow, she ends up with a little sparrow. The little girl puts every animal she catches in a cage. At home she sits in her chair and stares at a stack of cages. In each cage, the animals — her pets — stare back. She looks at them, they look at her, and they look at her, and she thinks things over for a while. And then she lets the animals free.

Lesson Focus: Sentence Fluency

Focus Grade Level: K-2

Time Frame: Several Days-Interactive

Focus Text/Author: I Was Walking Down the Road/Sarah E. Barchas and Jack Kent

Other Text: Janie and the giant 
by Sarah Barchas ; illustrated by Jack Kent.

•               1978 Piggy Bank Gonzales

•               1976 There's No Such Thing as a Dragon

•               1975 The Christmas Pinata

•               1974 Bremen Town Musicians

Materials: Chart paper, black marker, scissors, glue, blank pages for class big book, pictures of the chosen insects, self-portraits from students (to be characters in the story), and any clip art or pictures drawn by students depicting other key vocabulary Technology: Use Smart-Board Technology to incorporate authentic student pics/photos of themselves. Students can interact with the text by selecting it and moving it around the screen. This is done using Notebook Software. Ohio Academic Content Standards Lesson Focus: Writing Applications/Writing Process Standard Benchmarks: Writing Applications A. Compose writings that convey a clear message and include well-chosen details. Writing Process G. Publish writing samples for display or sharing with others, using techniques such as electronic resources and graphics. K-2 Benchmark: Indicators: 1st grade indicators Writing Applications Dictate or write simple stories, using letters, words or pictures. Writing Process Rewrite and illustrate writing samples for display and for sharing with others. Lesson: Sentence Fluency/Class Book 1.    We begin by reading “I Was Walking Down the Road,” enjoying the predictable language pattern and rhythm in the short repetitive sentences. On the second reading the children can easily jump in with the rhymes and with… “I caught it. I picked it up. I put it in a cage.” 2. We discuss and clap the rhythm of the words in the story, at first focusing only on the predictable sentences… “I caught it. I picked it up. I put it in a cage.” 3. Later we focus on the rhythm of the rhyming sentences (i.e., I was walking down the road. Then I saw a little toad.) We practice reciting the sentences choppy in order to easily hear & feel the beats. We make this fun by adding marching around the room while tapping the rhythm. Then we say the sentences smoothly, as we would normally speak them, to practice sentence fluency, but continue to tap the beat. We identify words with one and two syllables. 4. We decide to make our own class book using this same language pattern with its engaging rhythm. We count the beats in the rhyming sentences and notice each line has seven beats. We must follow this pattern. 5. We brainstorm a list of insects and then try our best to come up with rhymes for a few. The rule is we must use different insects than the author uses in her story. Extension Activities: PHYSICAL EDUCATION Play a game of Giant Steps with the class on the playground or in the gym. Beforehand, teach children various steps including a giant step, a baby step, a ballet dancer step in which you twirl around, a hopping step, a sliding step, and any others you wish to add. Have children line up on one side of the playground. Explain that you will call out a name and specific instructions. For example: “Sara, you may take three baby steps.” Sara must remember to say “May I?” before she takes her steps. If she forgets, she can't move or must return to the starting line. The object of the game is to reach you first. Play several practice rounds until children get the idea. Then allow them opportunities to give instructions. Resources: http://writingfix.com/6_Traits/Primary/I_caught_it.htm About the Authors:  http://www.scholastic.com Sarah Barchas is a published author and an editor of children's books. Some of the published credits of Sarah Barchas include I Was Walking Down the Road, Bridges Across the World: A Multicultural Songfest, Pinata! and More!: Bilingual Songs for Children. Jack Kent: Born in Burlington, Iowa, Kent dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen and began a career as a freelance commercial artist until he joined the U.S. Army in 1941. His first nationally recognized work was the King Aroo comic strip which was syndicated and distributed internationally from 1950 to 1965. He began writing and illustrating children's books in 1968. He continued to write and illustrate children's books until his death in 1985 from leukemia.