This post is insanely overdue. I did a Laura Numeroff unit with kindergarten in November and December. We started with Dogs Don’t Wear Sneakers at the end of our October “imagination” unit. Then starting in November we read all of her If You… books, starting with the classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. We talked about what “circular stories” are, stories that end the same way they began.
Tag: author studies
The first month of school has come and gone, and I spent it doing a Kevin Henkes author study with pre-k and kindergarten.
Henkes’s mouse stories are perfect for the start of the school year, and this year I was able to jump right in with them. I did this author study with pre-k last year, but not until March and not as thoroughly.
For the month of November, I focused on Eric Carle with all the pre-k classes. We’d read The Very Hungry Caterpillar as part of the book election I held, so I just bounced off from there. We read The Very Busy Spider, The Very Clumsy Click Beetle, and The Very Quiet Cricket. The kids loved the stories, and while reading each story I talked to the kids about what looked familiar in all these stories. The sun was the big thing I used to show the kids how all of Eric Carle’s books are his. 
It’s the same sun in every book, sometimes smiling. It doesn’t look like the sun in other picture books we’ve read, etc. We also talked about all the stories being about insects and arachnids (or to make it easy for the little ones, “crawlies” or “bugs”). And we talked about all the titles having “very” in them.