All About Authors & Illustrators in Kindergarten

We're just wrapping up a 4-week series on two very important words: author and illustrator. Our  kindergarteners are experts!

We broke the unit  up into four parts: an introduction to both roles, a day on authors, a day on illustrators, and a review of how they work together.

Day 1

I put up the word cards for author and illustrator and show the front cover of my read-aloud. Since I typically do this unit in the fall, my favorite to start with is Room on the Broom. I point to the two names on the front and tell them that Julia Donaldson is the author: she writes the words. I ask them if the words are important in the story. Of course, they say YES! I flip to the first page of the book and read it aloud - without showing them the picture. This is usually confusing for them, and I'm hearing a whisper of "Where are the pictures?" before I finish the page.

I ask them what could make the story better, and I invariably get, "PICTURES!" I point to the illustrator's name and tell them that Axel Scheffler is the illustrator: he draws the pictures. I flip to the second page and say, "Okay - what's going on on this page?" They have to interpret the picture to understand what's happening. I ask again what could make that story better, and I hear, "The WORDS!"

We talk about how we need both an author and an illustrator to make a great story, because we love both words and pictures. As the writing center for the week (and throughout this unit), kids can be both an author and an illustrator on a piece of paper through this freebie! 

Day 2: Authors

To really immerse ourselves into the study and discover what being an author is really like, we had to become authors for a week! I had uploaded 3 illustrations to Seesaw that I thought could spark a story:  a group of kids at recess, two bears in the woods, and a soccer game. I called kids up to be an author: record their voice telling a story about the picture. 4-6 kids recorded themselves before we went to centers and to check out books, and 4-6 again after. Not everyone did it, but I figured that was okay! I didn't want them to be on the devices themselves yet; this was our first time using Seesaw together, and I wanted to make sure to highlight using our "secret password" (which is a QR code very securely hidden on a bright pink index card with their teacher's name on it.... oops!) and the idea of logging out so no one else in the school could see what was on our class's private site.

Day 3: Illustrators

Turns out, they thought being illustrators was a heck of a lot more fun - you could hear a PIN drop during this lesson!!

We started with an illustration-heavy fall read-aloud: Too Many Pumpkins! This is a wordy story and would normally be way too long for K, but Megan Lloyd's illustrations are so vivid and descsriptive that I was able to read only every other page of text; on the alternating pages, I asked the kids to tell me the story based on what they saw in the illustrations! Talk about illustrators being important!

I demonstrated using our Drawing app: Doodle Buddy. I wanted a free app that gave kids the freedom to draw pretty much anything, but I'll tell you now - Doodle Buddy is not perfect! If you have suggestions for simple, free apps that allow kids to draw in different colors using their fingers, I'd love to hear them!

Despite the not-exactly-perfect-ness of Doodle Buddy, the kids were INTO this activity! This week, I got to be the author, and I told them simple stories - "Yesterday we had a fire drill!" "I'm going trick or treating tonight!" "The kindergarten classes went to the farm for a field trip!" The kids were the illustrators, and they had to draw a picture to go along with my story. Check out these super focused kindergarteners! They LOVED it!

What awesome illustrators!

Day 4: Being an Author and an Illustrator

Seesaw to the rescue again! Today the kindergarteners had their first Seesaw assignment. (Luckily, this was the week we were watching the book fair preview video, so I had a lot of time to log in each iPad to their class account and navigate to the assignment for them!) They had to be an author and an illustrator by drawing a picture on Seesaw and then recording their voice telling a story to go along with it. The parents loved this, and I was so impressed with how the kids did! We also got to practice logging out of Seesaw, which is an important skill.

Bonus Day: Authors & Illustrators, Part 2

Okay, so this bonus day was more because of poor planning on my part than anything else. Whoops!

We were supposed to move on to the first day of our author study, which involves using a mouse and Chromeboook.... buuuut this was our book fair week so Chromebooks were out of the question, since we were stuck on the carpet without our tables! Yikes!

We did a similar activity to last week's, but with a partner twist: Each partnership got one iPad, which the illustrator opened to Doodle Buddy. The author told a short story, which the illustrator then drew a picture of. They switched roles by switching nametags - most groups got to switch at least once, if not twice, as long as the pictures weren't too detailed! I didn't get any pictures of the kids engaged in this activity, but here are the nametags I used!

Now that we've got these two roles down pat, we're ready to move on to an author/illustrator study!