Cheers to School: Mo Willems Mania!

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Mo Willems Mania!

For the past month, my kindergarteners have been studying the famous author, Mo Willems. My students love his books, especially the Elephant and Piggie series.

Funny thing about Mo's books is his humor with all of his characters. Because I work and live in China, my students didn't understand this joke. So I had to change with a post-it!

Here are some things we did to celebrate Mo Willems.

We talked about speech bubbles, wrote our own and posed with our speech bubbles.

When we read "Pigeon Finds A Hot Dog", we talked about things we liked to put on our hot hog. Some of the kids put silly food on their hot dogs.

When we read the Knuffle Bunny books, we talked about the real photographs Mo used in the books. Instead of printing similar pictures from his books, I printed famous areas all around China like the Great Wall, the market, the mountains, the river, and McDonalds. My kids enjoyed drawing themselves with Knuffle Bunny!

We ended our author study by having a Happy Pig Day party. We discussed what you would wear to a Pig party. We made Pig hats, had a pig dance party with our principal who dressed up as a wolf (we were studying 3 little pigs), how a piggie photo booth, relay races, and a pink ice cream party! This is the first year I tried having a Pig Party and it was a success! Everyone in our school was talking about our party.

On Mo Willem's website, there is a link for Gerald and Piggie where you can make different dance sequences to music.

I used printed different party hats, pig noses, lips, and mustaches for the photo booth.

I also had this cardboard box turned into a bus for students to take pictures and pretend to drive a bus. They loved this so much, I let them play with it during drama center time.

I used a paper bag to make a nest and a plastic egg for students to walk back and forth trying to balance the nest on their head. Read "There's a Nest on my Head" from Mo Willems.