Mo Willems
We have been studying Mo Willems for the last two months. We’ve research a little about his life and work. We learned that he likes to make funny books, so we talked about the author’s intention when he’s writing a book. Willems likes that people laugh at the jokes in his books so he works hard at finding different ways to make people laugh. This led to an exercise where children created their own funny story and drew the illustration. This helped students understand that, as an author, you have the freedom to express yourself and you can decide what message or experience you want your audience to take from your book.
"A hippopotamus named Andrea was walking down the street. She passed by some cars when the traffic light was yellow and she jumped in front of the cars and screamed: "Stop!" One car was going to fast to stop so she screamed "Mama miaaaaa." Luciana A.
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"One day Pigeon went crazy and he passed it on to duckling. Duckling started screaming in the craziest way ever, who then passed on his craziness to Trixie. Trixie went so crazy she peed on her pants. The teacher laughed a lot." Galo
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We have been discussing Willems style. Students picked their favorite scene of a book and talked about the illustration.
We also learned that Willems has a daughter named Trixie and that’s the reason why he made the books about Knuffle Bunny and Trixie. Again, this helped children understand that an author can be inspired from personal experience and use this to create new stories.
Children noticed that in the Knuffle Bunny books, Willems uses real photographs for the setting and then he draws the characters as an illustration. We compared this type of illustration with other Willems books and they were all different. We reflected on how as the illustrator of the book you can decide on the style and technique you want to use. They loved the idea of using real photos, so we decided to create a story together using Willems’ style. (Book in progress. Stay tuned!)
Students also noticed that Willems likes to place characters from another book in a new book. For example, when reading Knuffle Bunny we found that Trixie has Pigeon’s books. After finding this, we started looking for other hidden characters in the new books we read. Now, students like to play I SPY A WILLEMS CHARACTER when they read his books. We invite you to play this with your child using the photos below:
Students wrote on their journal what they like about Willems stories.
They also played games on Willems official site.