David Shannon Author Study

Every May, my class does a David Shannon Author Study because I adore David Shannon almost as much as my students do.

Before the Common Core rolled out, I felt my kids needed to learn about stories and gain reading comprehension skills to be successful in 1st grade. Hence, we learned through the fun and inspiring David Shannon books.

Now that the Common Core is here, this unit ties in perfectly to what K teachers should be teaching. Before, this was an intro to first grade, now it is a culminating review of Kindergarten.

The first week we covered the No, David books. They are always a hit and easy reads for my kids.

This week, we used other books by David Shannon. After each book, we add a page to our David Shannon Author Study book we are creating.

We had to make David from these books because art always makes the books more meaningful and memorable to the student.

We use the book Alice the Fairy to review how important pictures are to a book.

Here are some of my kiddos and their fantastic work!

 We also read the book Too Many Toys, which features Spencer.

We adore him because he runs around in his space helmet the whole book!

Here is what Spencer looks like.

 We also identified the problem in this book and then thought of three ways to solve it. Some of the ways were realistic and some of them were so funny!

We talked about the main event in the story and how it was resolved. My kids could write about it or draw a picture about it.