I Call Them Author Competitions, But Really...

It's just an excuse for me to read more books to my younger students.  I started making a list of my students favorite books or ones I see them checkout often and was going to town until I started collecting photos of the authors and realized they were all White.  STOP!  Now, it's time to look up some authors from diverse backgrounds and introduce a few of those wonderful writers.  On the list: Nikki Giovanni, Grace Lin, Donald Crews, Alma Ada Flor, Mo Willems, and Peter Brown.  I feel that I was quite successful in our reading ventures, especially since students non-stop picked books to checkout from the display shelves of these authors.  

Here is how I introduced the concept which I borrowed from Pinterest (once again proving to myself that I don't just collect and store, I use pins too).  3 authors one week, then 3 different authors the next week.  I showed my students a flipchart on the Promethean Board that would allow me to graph each classes favorite author (this is where the photos came in handy).  I read aloud the stories and we discussed what we liked about each book and what we would change about each book.  Then I played videos of the authors, so that my students could see that authors are REAL people.  After that, they voted on which one they liked the best--which was tallied as a class for the graph.

Books read:
I Am Invite to a Party! by Mo Willems
You Will Be My Friend by Peter Brown
The Sun Is So Quiet by Nikki Giovanni
Fortune Cookie Fortunes by Grace Lin
Night at the Fair by Donald Crews
I Love Saturdays y domingos by Alma Ada Flor



Image courtesy of hin255 at freedigitalphotose.net