Guide Entry to 25.03.01
Students love an interactive story! Mo Willems stories with Pigeon, Elephant, and Piggie do just that. These books, written in a graphic narrative format, give students a chance to be part of the action. Mo Willems uses his Pigeon, Elephant, and Piggie characters to tell the stories, all while allowing students to interpret and think creatively about the action and the off-page participants in each book. This empowers students to think about the stories through their own individual lenses, aligning with the reader-response theory, a literary theory that emphasizes the reader's role in interpreting a text. This perspective allows the reader to draw on personal experiences, emotions, and individual interpretations as components of understanding what they are reading, as opposed to theories that prioritize author meaning or intention.
The two- to three-week Kindergarten unit introduces a wide array of Willems’ books, highlighting his use of speech and thought bubbles to tell the stories. Through the conversations and interactions between characters, students will learn the four types of sentences: statements, questions, commands, and exclamations. Students will sort, create, design, and collaborate as they learn to identify sentence types throughout the many Mo Willems books in this unit.
(Developed for Literacy, grade K; recommended for Reading, grades K-2)
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