TRY THIS TOMORROW: AUTHOR STUDY ALPHABETS
As I was scrolling through Twitter (X?) one night recently, I came across a post shared by Rebekah O’Dell from Casey Hackett about a Dickensian Alphabet she recently saw. She mentioned how it would be a great mentor text for students to try on their own. I was immediately drawn in to this idea as a companion to the books that students may be reading, but also as a companion to any author studies that you may be doing in your classes throughout the year.
The idea is simple, you take the author that you are currently reading or studying and create an alphabet of related vocabulary to represent that author and their works. You add illustrations, maybe some context, and suddenly you have an entire grid representing an author and their work. This not only supports vocabulary learning, but also helps to consolidate our understanding of text and make decisions about what is important to represent themes, characters, settings etc. Students are actively seeking out vocabulary, connections, and annotating from their text as they work through this activity. Here are two examples of these Author Study Alphabets:
Whether students work on this as a group during an author study, or you have students create their own based on their independent reading selections, there is sure to be some great connections and conversations had about the texts students are engaging with. If you decide to try this with your class, we would love to see what students come up with!
The original post with this idea is linked here. Casey Hackett on X: “Could be a #MentorText for students to create their own based on what or who they are reading.” / X (twitter.com)