Preschoolers as Authors and Illustrators

We finished our Mo Willems author study this week. I was sad to see it come to an end, because we've had so much fun giggling over all his hilarious tales!

It's always neat to focus on one author with preschoolers and show them how so many different ideas can come from one person. I think the concept of author - writer - can be lost on little readers. We gloss over it. But I have found that even preschoolers can develop a preference for certain authors when given the opportunity to become familiar with various writing and illustrating styles.

We watched this little video from Mo Willems a couple weeks ago in class. I love how he encourages kids to write at the very end. My students really perked up at that part!

This last week, I figured my students might feel confident and ambitious enough to want to try to write something of their own. So I brought along my giant writing paper and we got to work. Each student got to add a part to the story. You can see their stories below. (Please excuse any grammatical errors in my transcription. It's tough to write fast enough to keep up with a group of preschoolers dictating at lightening speed and all shouting "Me next! Me next!")

Bet you can't tell which story was written by a group of all boys, and which was written by a group of almost all girls!

Our story for this week was Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed. Since Mo Willems used watercolors for the illustrations in their book, we used watercolors to illustrate our stories too!

This student in the above photo decided to keep writing, instead of illustrating. She came over and very animatedly "read" me her story and then declared, "Mo Willems will love this!"