Becoming the Author and Illustrator! Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems

I LOVE BOOKS! I love working with my fantastic librarian because she has the most amazing selection of books I can use as resources with my students. I also have a collection of books that I took out from the Library that I keep in my classroom for students to look at during their free time in my reading center! If you are not familar with Mo Willems, then you should check out his work. I love introducing new art techniques and processes with my students through the use of the work illustratos have done for amazing children's books. They make a great connection with it and they also can not wait to get to the library to check the book out when we are finished discussing and reading it for our lesson!

My 2nd grad students have a storytelling unit that I do with them every year. What I did is I went around my community and took photographs of familiar places that students have gone to or seen in our community. I also took some photographs from magazines and photo copied them. We used this as the backgrounds for out stories. Students had to draw their own characters and cut them out. I made copies of their characters to save the time of cutting and drawing. We discussed Willems style and used a similar technique in our books with the black and white backgrounds and colorful characters. I then had the books bound so they could take them home. They shared the stories with some of the kindergarten students. This was a great lesson and the students LOVED become authors and illustrators of their own work.