Knuffle Giraffe

While it has taken a bit of time to get our book together with our crazy schedule over the last few weeks, our Knuffle Giraffe story is FINALLY complete! We are going to be added animated versions of our pictures to SeeSaw over the next few days, but we also wanted to share the illustrations here as well! The book itself will become part of our classroom library for the giraffes to read throughout the year and then pass on to future giraffes! 

It was so much fun to take a tour of our community through the lens of the giraffes. We are very lucky to live in this incredible town!

Congratulations, Authors and Illustrators! 

Knuffle Bunny Project: A Look at Stratham

Did you know that author Mo Willems used real pictures from his community in his illustrations for his book Knuffle Bunny? He took real black and white photos from his neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY to use in his story!

Since we too are learning about our own community and what we can do to support it, we are going to make our own Knuffle Bunny-inspired illustrations of our town of Stratham. Please take a landscape photo (without people) of any place in our town where you spend lots of your time. It could be a photo outside of our school, Stratham Hill Park, The Wiggin Memorial Library, or even right in your own neighborhood! Please e-mail these photos to Ms. Riley (ariley@sau16.org) by October 20th. We will print out our photos and make our illustrations at school! Want to see some examples of this project from past years? Click here!

*If you are able to make your photos black and white before sending them, it would be much appreciated. No worries if you cannot, we can certainly help!

Knuffle Giraffe

Over the last few weeks, we have been working on creating our pages for our Knuffle Giraffe book. We each brought in black and white photos from our favorite parts of our town of Stratham, and we illustrated them using the stylings of one of our favorite authors and illustrators, Mo Willems to create a story to celebrate our amazing community.

We each wrote a narrative to go with our pictures, and we put all of our words and illustrations together into a book that is now on display in the giraffe class! 

Knuffle Bunny Project

Knuffle Bunny Project: A Look at Stratham

Did you know that author Mo Willems used real pictures from his community in his illustrations for his book Knuffle Bunny? He took real black and white photos from his neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY to use in his story!

Since we too are learning about our own community and what we can do to support it, we are going to make our own Knuffle Bunny-inspired illustrations of our town of Stratham. Please take a photo of any place in our town where you spend lots of your time. It could be a photo outside of our school, Stratham Hill Park, The Wiggin Memorial Library, or even right in your own neighborhood! Please e-mail these photos to Ms. Riley (ariley@sau16.org) by  Monday, November 14th. We will print out our photos and make our illustrations at school!

*If you are able to make your photos black and white before sending them, it would be much appreciated. No worries if you cannot, we can certainly help!

We will be talking more about this project on Monday in class, and we will add our characters and write about our photos once we receive all of our pictures. Want to see some examples of student work in the past? Click here!

Knuffle Giraffe: An Educational Tale by 2R

This week, we worked on converting our black and white photos of Stratham into our Mo Willems-inspired illustrations for our Knuffle Giraffe class book! 

We talked a lot about perspective when drawing our pictures. Once we decided on where we wanted to place ourselves in our picture, we talked about how big our illustrated selves should be and we also talked about what we should be doing in our pictures. Some of our characters are posing with some of their favorite places, while others are opening doors, jumping in leaves, and sliding on the playground! 

We also worked on writing short narratives about our illustrations, where we talked about the places in our photographs and what we like to do there, which Ms. Riley has typed up to add to our book. Here are a few pages of our story: