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!

Studying the Craft of Kevin Henkes

Whenever we read a new Kevin Henkes story, we've noticed certain parts of his writing and illustration that appear in many of his books. On Friday, Ms. Riley told us those things we'd been noticing are part of Kevin Henkes' craft. His craft involves anything he does on purpose to make his writing look or sound a certain way. It is the art of writing! 

After talking about Kevin Henkes' craft, we got to work finding those craft techniques in his stories! We worked together with our reading partners to find examples of each craft (mouse characters, comic strip pictures, lots of dialogue, talk in pictures, and repeating sentences) and wrote them down. We were lucky enough to also have the help of several other teachers that day (from SMS and beyond!), who were in observing literacy in second grade! We shared our findings with one another and found many connections across his stories.

This week, we are working hard to include many of those craft techniques in our own writing. We've especially had fun with adding those techniques into our illustrations! Our stories are coming along so well, and we've really enjoyed sharing our ideas and rough drafts with one another.  

Authors as Mentors: Kevin Henkes

Over the last few days, we've slowly begun to transition into our latest writing unit Authors as Mentors. We've been reading lots of books by Kevin Henkes, who has written many children's books over the years, and we've been making a list of things we notice about his writing as well as his illustrations.

One of the things we've noticed in the books we've read so far is that Kevin Henkes uses mice for his characters. Today, we created our own Kevin Henkes characters and gave them a name. We made a list of names we've read in other stories, names of people we know, and names we just liked in general :) We will continue to talk about these characters and who they are throughout the week, and soon we will begin to write stories about them!