Mem Fox Author Study

The Mackarados are really enjoying our Mem Fox Author study! Just walk into our room and you can see lots of evidence of our learning!

Students first learned about Mem Fox, herself and then became emersed into her capitaving stories filled with interesting Australian animals and characters. They are such engaged readers!

As a class, we have studied Wilfrid Gordon Macdonald Patridge, Possum Magic, Koala Lou and will be getting into Tough Boris this week. We read each book several times and discuss many aspects of each book, including the characters, new and interesting language we noticed, wondering or questions we have, connections to the story and the overall theme of the book.

Then in Readers' Workshop, students use Accountable Talk to discuss their own ideas with a partner or with a small group. The Mackarados love the opportunity to share with each other and the whole class.

They have been working hard at staying on topic with so much to talk about!

As an independent reader, they take those same skills and apply what good readers notice in their own reading. And after each work period, students share and you would be surprised at the things they notice or were wondering about or connections they made, etc. They also use some of those skills to figure out new words or language they come across in their reading- we had to use these skills a lot with all of those new animals, food and cities we had never heard of!

In Writers' Workshop, students are writing their own Small Moment narrative stories and we use Mem Fox's stories of excellent examples of engaging writing. Students love trying to make their work as fun to read as the books they hear aloud each day.

The students are learning so much! We are even discussing new vocabulary (other then the funky Australian words!) that we notice in her stories. The students love showing off their knowledge of big words and begin to find them everywhere! We like to turn our vocabulary words from each book into a project to display around the room and keep them fresh in our minds!