Rachael:  Hey, guys, Rachael here.  Before we dive into today's episode, I just want to address real quickly what's going on in our communities and our world and most definitely now in our schools. And that is, of course, the situation surrounding the coronavirus. And first of all, I am just unbelievably inspired by how teachers around the world have stepped up to help out other educators by providing resources and ideas and tips and tricks for how we navigate this new educational environment that we're trying to create for our students.

And I wanted to let you know how I'm trying to support teachers in this new digital learning environment.  I wanted to let you know that on our website classroomnook.com, if you go to the Members Resource Library, which you'll see a link to it at the top of the page, I have created a new section within our members Resource Library with some free distant learning resources.   Currently, right now, I have five resources to help support distance learning or e-learning, whatever you're calling it. One of those resources is for an online reader’s workshop and It includes five days of video lessons and activities for your students. There's a science experiment that students can do at home. There is a writing activity, and there's just some other things there that you might want to check out.

So I'm trying to support teachers in any way that I can please head over to classroomnook.com, you'll see the link, again up there, for the Members Resource Library. Sign up to get all of those resources. in addition to the dozens and dozens of other resources that are already there for you as well. But specifically, I wanted to highlight that if you scroll down to the bottom of the Members Resource Library, you'll see a new section there for distance learning. So I hope that that helps you out in this uncertain time that we are all facing, and it will help you help your students to continue learning while they're at home. All right, let's jump into the show.

Rachael:  Hey, teachers. If you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host. Rachael and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.        

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Classroom Commute Podcast. I'm Rachael, your host. And we did it. We made it to the last part of our mini training series that we're doing here on the podcast, all about author studies.

So if you've been with me in the past four weeks, you know that we've talked about how to choose authors, how to choose books for your author study and how to choose what format works best for your students. On the flip side, if you have just stumbled across this mini-series, then you're going to want to go back and check out the 1st three parts of this series so that you've got all the background that you need to move forward today as we talk about activities to include in your author's studying.

 And you can do that by checking out episodes eight, nine, and ten, just the past three episodes, and you'll get caught up to speed. Then, come back here and join us for this final installment of our author’s study training series.

And in this last episode for this series, I'm going to throw out a lot of ideas out at you, so make sure that you head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/11 to get all of the ideas that I'll be featuring today, and so that you can grab an idea or two and add them to your own author study.

And finally, before we jump into today's topic. If you haven't already taken a quick second to rate and review this podcast, I would be so appreciative if you did that so that other teachers can come to find The Classroom Commute Podcast.

All right -- to help you get organized in thinking about the activities that you want to include, I'm going to divide the activities into four categories to kind of help you wrap your mind around it. So the four categories are:

• activities that help students connect to the author
• activities that have students connect different books in your author study
• activities for teaching reading skills and strategies throughout your author study
• activities to end your author study with
• and finally, as a bonus I'm going to give you some quick tips for how to get your classroom ready and set up for an author study.

All right, you ready? Let's wrap this up.

The first type of activity that you can include in your other study are those activities that help connect students to the author. One of the main reasons you're doing an author study in the first place, as opposed to any other kind of reading unit, is to help your students engage, interact and become inspired by your other. So the activities that I'm going to mention in the next few minutes are going to help you do just that.

The first activity is to begin your study by introducing some fun facts about your author. The very first lesson that I do in any author study that I've ever created for students is to begin by reading a short biography about the author that explores some interesting facts about that author as a person. These facts often include information about the author's life as a child, specifically because this helps students to see that the author was once young like them with hobbies and interests that they might have. I also usually like to include information about the author's family, things about their schooling, like where they went to college, if they did, or any hardships that they may have had in life and how they overcame them. I especially like showing students that others, too, have struggles in life, and they're still able to be successful. Patricia Polanco is a great example of this. Students are usually surprised to find out that she had a learning disability and struggled through school all growing up.

Sometimes I can find these short biographies online somewhere, and other times I write them myself just to make sure that they include information and facts that I think are going to be most helpful to help students connect with the author.

Another activity that I like to do to help students connect to the author is to listen to, or watch a recording of the author reading his/her own books. Students love to see this. They love hearing the books in the author's own voice. YouTube is a great resource for this. If you happen to find an audio or video recording of a book from your study, as told by the author, have students listen or watch it as an alternative to hearing you read it to them. You can even have students illustrate the events and the characters in the story as they're listening to it.

You can also have students watch or read an interview with the author. I prefer a video interview if I can find one, but certainly I will use a written interview if that's all I can find available. A video interview, I feel, helpd students to make a stronger connection because they can actually see and hear the author talk. However, if a written interview is all that's available, I'm sure to include lots of pictures from the past, as well as current pictures of the author for students to refer to.  Reading Rockets has a huge list of author interviews that you can use, and they work great at the beginning of your unit to help introduce the author.

You can also have students write a letter to the author. They can tell the author about their favorite book, character or event, and even ask the author questions that they're wondering. Many authors have websites that have contact information and you might even hear back from some of those authors.

You can create a list of questions and wonderings that your students have about the author as you read their books and discuss their life. Keep track of these questions and wonderings and refer to it and add to it throughout your study.

And finally, a great way to help students connect to the author is to make lists of things that you and your students are noticing about the author's writing style. I create lists of common topics that the author includes in his or her writing or the ways that the author likes to begin or end the story, and so on.

So those are all activities that you can do throughout your unit to help the students connect to the author.

Another type of activity that you're going to want to include are activities that helps students connect book-to-book in the author study. A really easy way to do this throughout your whole entire unit is to create an attributes chart. I'll include a picture of this in the show notes because it's a little hard to visualize if you don't see it right in front of you. But essentially, an attributes chart is where you list the book titles that you're reading and the next each book title you list the characters, the problems and solutions, the settings, and several other things that you keep note about in each book. And then students can see each book and all of the attributes about that book, side by side.   It really helps them to make connections where they might say, “Oh, I noticed that this character was used in this book and then also in this book as well.”

So again, I'll show you a picture of what it might look like in the show notes so you can create one for your classroom.

Another activity that helps students to connect different books in the author study is to simply use a Venn Diagram, a teacher's favorite tool, right?  Have students compare and contrast two books, or maybe even two characters from two different books. This can be done as a whole class, or you could even have them do it in partners or individuals.

The last activity for connecting books inside your author study is to create book categories with your students. Now, we already talked about the fact that you're going to create book categories as you are creating your author study. But it's also a really great activity for your students to do because it allows you to see what connections they're making between the different books in your author studies.

So they might group books based on the types of illustrations that they see, or books with the same characters or same themes. It's a great informal assessment tool for you to see what kinds of connections they are making within the different books.

The third type of activity that you're going to want to include in your author study are those activities that you're going to use for teaching reading skills and strategies. I've already said it several times in this mini-series that author studies can be used as a vehicle to teach your curriculum, and these next activities are going to be perfect for doing that.

The first activity is to use the author's books as models for great writing techniques. We want our students to use the author as a writing mentor and to do this we can point out the unique ways that the author begins and ends their stories, or creates strong characters, or their use of language.  You can keep a list and refer to it when students are writing their own stories.

You can also teach theme with your author studies. Often, books by the same author will carry similar themes as well, so you can teach and compare these themes throughout your study. I talked a little bit about this in episode nine, where I gave you a little sneak peek into the backstage planning for my Eve Bunting Author Study. So if you want to see the activity that I did all around theme for that, make sure you head back to Episode nine and listen to that again.

You can also create a story mountain with your students to help teach the plot of a story. One of my favorite ways to teach the structure of the story is he use a story mountain graphic organizer, because it's an easy way for students to see the flow of how the story fits together from the background information to the building action, to the climax, falling action, and solution of the story in an author study. I often have students complete a story mountain for at least two books that can be easily compared. That way, students can refer to their story mountain to see similar features from the two different stories.

Another activity is to teach character analysis and development. Although you can teach character analysis and development in any book that you're teaching, it can be especially revealing if a character appears in several books by the same author. For example, Patricia Polacco often writes stories about herself as a child. Her character, Tricia, as she refers to herself, appears in several books. After reading several of her books that include her as a character, students can record important information about Tricia. They could note things that they learn about her or how she reacts to tough situations and analyze her actions, thoughts and words.

The next activity is to create lists and charts that represent the reading skills and strategies that you're learning about. Lists are a great way for students to record information quickly and can refer to them often. Here is some lists of things that you might create to help teach and reinforce skills and strategies being learned through your study.

• Collect samples of descriptive language that an author is using
• Organize characters from different books based on character traits.
• Create a list of different types of words used in author's books -- for example, new words, strong adjectives and so on
• Create a list of different types of settings that the author uses. Students can then maybe use these settings in their own writing

Create ongoing lists and charts to represent the reading skills and strategies that your students are learning in their author study.

You can also create activities that help students to explore the author's writing craft. In an activity that I did during my Chris Van Allsburg author study, I had students explore the ways that Van Allsburg uses strong, descriptive words to paint a picture in a reader's mind. In one lesson, I had the students read the book Jumanji and had them look for strong verbs that the author used.  Then, I had them illustrate the image that came to mind when reading that verb.

And in that same lesson, we talked about how we can use strong verbs in our own writing to create more of a detailed picture in the reader's mind

And the last activity is to help students practice a skill that we are always working on with our students: fluency. Whether they are early readers or advanced readers, we’re always wanting them to practice fluency. And we can do that through reader’s theater. We can use readers theater with the books from our author study.

To do this, I take dialogue from the characters in a specific book, and I retype it up in a script format. I'll use the narration, meaning, the non-dialogue portions of the story, and assign that text to a narrator in the script. You can easily adapt or modify the text as needed for instructional purposes.  

After reading a book, or several books, by the author, I divide students up into small groups, and I give each group a reader's theater script that represents an excerpt from that book by our author.  Each group can have the same except, or different ones. It's totally up to you, but they'll read it in their small groups. By doing this, they are reviewing the story as well as practicing their fluency.

If you're working with older students, maybe challenge them to create the reader's theater script using a selected book. It's a great way to sneak in a little lesson on how to write using dialogue.

All right, finally, I have some activities that you can use to end you author study with. Here is some from ways to wrap up your unit in meaningful ways.

The first way is to make a graph of your students’ favorite book or character by the author. Give each student a Post-it note and have them write down the title of their favorite book or character. Use the Post-it note to create a bar graph showing the students responses.

You can also have an author study celebration. Spend the afternoon with snacks and the author's books. How students reread the books to each other in small groups or even invite a younger class to come in, and read the books to them. Encourage parents to come in and celebrate with their child, if that's something that would work out with your day.  

You can also provide students with a choice board to complete author study related projects.  I did this with my Chris Van Allsburg author study. I created a choice board that included activities from crafts to writing book reviews to writing a sequel to one of the author's books, writing a short biography about the author or even designing a poster to advertise their favorite book.

The next thing that you could do to end your author study is to create a class paper quilt with their favorite book scenes. Have students choose their favorite scene from any book that you read during the author study. Provide each student with a paper quilt square to illustrate that scene and then provide a short caption describing that scene. When you combine all the squares together, you have yourself and author study quilt.

You can also have students dress up as their favorite character. Pick a day for students to come in dressed up as their favorite character from any book that you read by that author. You can even encourage them to talk or act, if appropriate, of course, in the way that the character would for the day, or for a specific amount of time during your day. Extend the activity by having the students interview each other using questions that they might ask about their characters, such as “What are your favorite hobbies?”, “Do you have any siblings”, etc... And students would have to answer the questions in the way that their character would.

And finally, you can prepare a “Guess That Book” activity. When you're finished reading all of the books in your author study, choose specific excerpts from several books to read back to your students and have your students try to guess which book that except was coming from. You’ll want a photocopy or retyped the except on to different pieces of paper so that students don't know which book you're reading from. You can even turn it into a competition by dividing students into teams.

Holy cow! That was a lot of information all that once. So don't forget, you can head to the show notes and see all of these activities that I have outlined for you in written form that you can review them and pick the ones that might work best for your students.

Finally, I told you that I would give you some tips on how to get your classroom ready for your author study. You want to make your author’s study stand out in your classroom so that it feels different from your regular reading instruction. So here are some things that you might consider doing to prepare your room for your other study:

• You could make a bulletin board with pictures of your author. You can include pictures from their childhood all the way up to their adult.
• You can have an ongoing chart posted where your students can write down thoughts and questions that they have about the author and their books.
• Have a cozy area in your reading corner designated specifically for reading books by your author. All you need to do is just create a basket of your author's books and have them there for students to read on their own.
• You can create a fun facts bulletin board in your classroom, listing facts about your author
• Before your study, you can arrange for parents or your principal or other teachers in your building, or even other volunteers to come to your classroom to read one of your author’s books for your author study
• And finally, you could make a timeline of the book covers showing the order in which the book was published.  You'll have to make copies, of course. Find them on Google and print them out, and you can glue them on two large sheets of butcher paper or even onto a bulletin board.

So there you have it, author’s studies from start to finish.

Over this past mini-series, we have covered so much material.  I hope it's been helpful to kind of help you wrap your minds around what goes into planning, preparing and delivering an author’s study unit to your students.

And if you're still feeling a little overwhelmed about creating one for yourself, sometimes it helps to see one that's already done for you from start to finish so that you can use to model your own after. And if that's the case, I do have three author studies that I've created that I have available on teachers pay teachers. If you want to check them out, I have one for Chris Van Allsburg. I have one for Eve Bunting, and I have one for Patricia Polacco. I'll include the links to them in the show notes along with everything that we've talked about today in this episode.

Thank you so much again for joining me. I am very honored that you decide to spend a little bit of your day with me and I hope to see you again next week. Have a great rest of your day. Take care!