Authors As Mentors: Writing Like Kevin Henkes

Since wrapping up our small moment stories, we have been working on writing like author Kevin Henkes, who has written and illustrated many stories over the years. We have been reading and studying his stories during Reader's Workshop to learn about his crafts as an author, and we've been applying those crafts to our own writing!

We noticed that many of Kevin Henkes' stories involve mice characters, so we each set to work creating our own mouse character. We gave each of our characters a name along with 3 characteristics that described their personalities. 

After creating our characters, we planned out our stories. We noticed that Kevin Henkes writes about things that could happen in real life (realistic fiction) so we planned stories that had realistic problems and solutions. 

We also noticed Kevin Henkes uses lots of dialogue in his text, adds words to his pictures, and often uses more than one picture on a page to show what is happening in the story (we called that technique comic strip pictures). We've been hard at work all week long adding many of these techniques to our own writing and our stories are coming our fantastically! Even picky Lilly from Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse would have to agree that these stories are truly wonderful :)

As we have finished our stories, we've shared them with their classmates to get feedback on the Wows and Wonders of our tales so we can make our great stories even better. We are looking forward to adding more to our stories next week!