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Hey, teachers. If you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachel and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers toe want actionable tips, simple strategies and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the classroom commute. I'm your host, Rachel Parla, and I am so glad that you are spending a little time with me today. Hey, before we get started, I just wanted to tell you, if you haven't already, I would so appreciate it. If you left a review of this podcast. You can do it right there. If you're listening in iTunes, you can just swipe up a little bit right where you're listening to this episode and you can rape and review this podcast. And that just helps other teachers find me and just gets the word out about the classroom commute podcast to others. So I would appreciate it if you took just a quick second to do that. All right. Today we're going to do something a little different. I'm gonna be starting a podcast miniseries all about authors studies. And if you've never done an author study before in your classroom, this is going to be the Siri's for you. It'll help walk you through how to get started with them with your classrooms that you can do them with success with your students. I loved doing author studies with my students. I did them in third grade. I did him in fourth grade, and every time I did them with my students, I fell in love with them. More and more author studies just provide a little change of pace from your regular reading instruction. So if you've never done them before, hopefully, after listening to the next three episodes, you will be convinced that you should be using them in your classroom. And, by the way, everything that we're going to be talking about in this episode and in the episodes to come you confined on the website in the show notes. So for this particular one, you are going to be able to find all the show notes. All the resource is that I talk about at classroom nook dot com. Forward slash podcast forward slash eight and make sure you do the number eight and not the word eight, and you'll be taken right to the show notes where you can check out any of the details that you may have missed or want to review as you are planning for your other study. So I'm gonna bring it up in four parts today. We're gonna talk about choosing an author because I think it's probably the most important decision that you make Win doing an author study. You want to make sure that you choose authors that your students are gonna fall in love with that, are going to be relevant to them and ones that they're just gonna connect with. So today we're gonna talk about what makes a good author for another study and some things that you might consider when choosing an author. So when you're ready, I'm ready. Let's go ahead and get started, all right. So one of the reasons that I love doing author studies with students is because it's a way to get your students turned on to reading. If you have some reluctant readers in your classroom, and you always do every year, have students who may not love to read authors. Studies can often be an easy way to get that student or those students that may not love reading turned onto it. It kind of reminds me of that picture book. It's called Miss Malarkey leaves No Reader Behind Its by Kevin O'Malley and all linked to it in the Show notes. But if you haven't read it, it's this cute little picture book about a teacher who's determined to find a book for each of her students by the end of the year that they're going to fall in love with even the boy in her classroom that just hates reading and spoiler alert. By the end of the year, she is successful and finds a book for each of her students to love, huh? If only it were that easy, right? But I think we can all relate to miss malarkey because we want to be that teacher that finds the perfect book for each of her students that will trigger a life long love for reading. And I think author studies air just one great way to do that, to get students excited about reading. So we're going to get started in this miniseries on the podcast with talking about how to choose an author. And then later on in this miniseries, we're gonna talk about how to choose books for your other study. And then we're gonna talk about how to format and differentiate your other study to meet the needs of your students. And then finally, we will talk about some activities that you can do with the books that you're reading in your author Studies sound good. Good. All right. Well, as we begin, I want to make sure that we're on the same page about what an author study is. So when I speak about author studies, I'm talking about a study that explores several books by the same author so that Soon's can really delve deeply into the life and the craft of that author. They'll explore common themes, characters, topics and writing styles of that author and typically think of an author study having three different components. So the first component is that each other's study that you create should have opportunities for students to connect with the author themselves right from the beginning. So this could be a simple as learning some fun facts about the author, learning about the author's personal life through a short biography of you confined one watching short video clips of that author being interviewed. There's tons of those on YouTube or even just listening to audio recordings of the author reading their own books. Those are all great ways to help students connect to the author right from the beginning of your study. And you want to do this so that students can actually begin to see the author as a real person. Seeing writers as real people can really inspire students to think of themselves as writers, so you want to make sure that you provide plenty of opportunities for the students to connect with the other. The second component that I like to include in an author study is book exploration, and this is gonna be the meat of your unit. Here is where the students are gonna interact with the books in a variety of ways. They're gonna hear them in a read aloud setting. They'll read them independently or in partner reading or maybe even guided reading. And we're going to talk all about how you are going to incorporate book exploration in your unit later on. But just to kind of get your wheels turning. You want to think about ways that you're gonna allow your students to explore the books from the author, And when they do this, they're gonna start noticing commonalities between the different books, like the same characters of the same places and themes. It's in the book exploration component that your students are really going to get to the heart of an author study. And the final component of an author study is giving your students opportunities to respond to the books and to the author. Now, this is gonna be a component that's going to weave in and out of your unit. You might read two or three books by your author and then group some of those books together based on common themes or characters. And then, after reading those books, you're going to choose a couple response activities that will tie those books together. It could be a group project. It could be an individual writing piece, a craft of some sort, depending on which fits your students in the age group that you're working with. And we're going again talk a whole bunch about the different types of response of activities that you can do with your Aah students later on in this little miniseries. So don't worry if that doesn't quite seem clear to you just yet or if you not sure what, exactly that means I'm going to cover it all. I'll get you there. I promise. Okay, so you've got the three components of your author studies. You're gonna You have opportunities for students to connect to the author. That's component number one. Component number two. His book exploration and component three is having response activities. Off course. You need to have an author. You need to choose your author before you can do any of that. Since you're going to be spending a good amount of time with one author, you need to choose wisely. Not every author is going to make a great choice for an author study. So the one that you do choose is a little bit of a big decision. It could make or break your unit. And in order to choose the best author, you really need to know your students as readers, you need to know things that they like, things that things that they don't like things that they're interested in. So this is why I do not suggest doing an author study right at the beginning of the school year because you don't have enough information about your students as readers, or even just as kids in general, you don't have enough information about the things that they like and to make a really well informed decision. So make sure you wait long enough in the school year to when you really know your students and you know that you're going to choose an author that they will enjoy. So here are some things to consider when narrowing down your decision. Your choice about what author you're going to use. Think about which genre will work best for your students and meet their reading goals. Here are a few questions that you might ask yourself in regards to this Number one. Do your students enjoy a particular genre? If so, maybe you can choose an author from a genre that you know will be, ah, win for your students and really capture their attention. This is going to be especially helpful if you have some reluctant readers. Another question you might ask yourself is, Do you need to expose your students to a new genre? Maybe your district curriculum requires you to cover a specific genre. In that case, you can choose an author that will support your curriculum requirements. For example, maybe your grade level is required to study the fantasy genre. I know that when I taught fourth grade, that was one of the genres that we were to do a unit on. And so I chose Chris Van Allsburg, who writes a lot of fantasy picture books for my students, to do another study for, and I can link to the unit that I used in the show notes in case that's a genre that your students would enjoy as well. The third thing that you might want to ask yourself is, Can you pick a genre to correlate with another content area? Meaning Are you teaching something in science and social studies that can be also tied into your author study? So, for example, if you're teaching about animals in your science curriculum, choose a non fiction author like Steve Jenkins, who writes amazing nonfiction picture books. Many of them are about animals, and you can use him as your author, so you'll be enriching their knowledge about animals through the books. And you also be teaching nonfiction reading skills like how to comprehend nonfiction text features. So the first thing that you're gonna want to consider when you're choosing your author is which genre do you think will work best for your students while also helping you meet some of those reading skills and strategies that you need to cover in your curriculum as well? The second thing to keep in mind when choosing an author is will you need to choose an author with a variety of reading levels now. This may or may not apply to you. For example, let's say your grade level departmental eyes is and you're great level Team breaks up your students into reading groups based on reading abilities. Then perhaps you don't have to worry about this as much because the students in each of your reading groups are going to be reading on about the same level. But if you teach a reading class that has a variety of reading levels, then you're gonna definitely want to consider choosing an author that writes at a variety of reading levels as well so that all your students can still participate in the same author, Sonny. But you can format your author study in such a way that students can read different books by that author, and those books are going to be appropriate for their reading level. So it's just something to consider. Do you need to choose an author that has a variety of reading levels? Another thing to keep in mind when choosing an author is that you want to make sure that you choose another that has unique, high quality content. Now this might see obvious because you want. Anytime you choose a book for your students to read, you want it to be high quality. But when I say unique, high quality, what I really mean is that you want to choose an author that does something special really well, something that is unique to them. So, for example, do they write in a really humorous writing style that's very obviously them? Or does the author do a great job of making the reader feel emotions, or do they write with beautiful imagery? So this is what I mean by a signature writing style, another form of unique, high quality content is choosing an author that has illustrations in their book that a really distinctive that when you see those illustrations, it's very obvious that it's that author that's something that you can draw upon when you are doing your other study. It's something that's gonna stand out about that author. And finally, another unique, high quality example is choosing an author that has a certain element that is consistent throughout all over their books. Things like a specific character, a setting or a theme or topic that is seen repeated over and over. This helps students to make connections between books. So, for example, the author Patricia Palak Oh, uses the same character babushka, meaning grandma in many of her books and students get to know the babushka. They kind of see some development of that character over the course of several books, and it just helps students to again make a connection between books by the same author. So when you're considering an author, see if you can find that unique, high quality content that you can see throughout all of their texts, all right, in the last thing to think about, kind of maybe the most obvious one is you want to choose an author that students are going to have a high interest in making it easy for students to connect with. If it's done correctly. If your author study is done correctly, students will begin to view the author that you have chosen as their author. So you got to give him an author that they can see themselves in and easily relate to. This is why waiting until later on in the school year to do another city will help, Since you will know that what topics are going to interest your students most okay, before we move on, let's just quickly review the four things to consider when choosing an author. Number one. Choose an author that writes in the genre that will work best for your students and meet some of the reading goals that you have for your students number to choose an author with a variety of reading levels. If that makes sense for your students, if you have a variety of readers that we're gonna be looking at this author number three. Choose an author that has unique, high quality content, something that is special just to that author and number four, choose an author that students will be highly interested in and will be easily able to connect with. So now, with all that in mind, you need to think about whether you're going to choose an author that writes chapter books or an author that writes picture books. The choice is yours, obviously, but there are a few things to think about. If you have younger kiddos, say, second grade, maybe early third grade, then you're most likely going to want to choose an author that writes picture books, especially if it's their first other city. In fact, if this is your first author study, no matter what grade you're reading, a picture book author study might be the best choice because you don't want to overwhelm them with too much. And shorter picture books will give your readers a quick win where they can just enjoy the author a little at a time. However, with older students, you have some options because older students can handle those longer chapter books. But your author said he is going to look a little different if you're using chapter books versus picture books to point out the obvious chapter books are going to take you longer to get through, then picture books, and you're probably not going to have your class read through several chapter books by the same author one after another, like you would a picture book or else you'd have no time to teach anything else. And we'll talk a little bit more later on in this little miniseries about what a chapter book author said he would look like in your classroom. So don't worry too much about thinking about that part right now. Right now. You just need to consider whether or not you want to do a chapter book, author study or a picture book author study and which authors you might choose based on the things that we've already talked about. All right, I know we haven't even really scratched the surface on what it means to create an author's study, but I will promise I will get you there. I will walk you through step by step, what you need to know before creating an author study for your students today. I just want you to start thinking about those authors that maybe you know your students already love or those genres that you know your students are already reading. And next week on the podcast, we are going to dive into how to choose books by the author that you chosen what makes a good book for your author study and so much more. I've got so much to share with you guys. I hope you will join me again next week, and we will pick up where we left off. And finally for today's show notes with all of this stuff that we've talked about today you can find it over on the website at classroom note dot com. Forward slash podcast forward slash eight. All right, that's all for me today. Thanks so much for joining me. I love our time together and I cannot wait to do it again next week. Have a great rest of your day Five for now.