I’ve recently updated my Jan Brett unit. Jan Brett is definitely my favorite author. I know I’m not alone on that one. 🙂 When I taught first grade, my teaching partner and I always looked forward to this unit. I started this unit my first year of teaching first grade then kept adding more and more each year. Something tells me I’ll continue to add to it in the future. There is so much you can do! I have ideas for other Jan Brett books, but time gets in the way of creating more. I hope to keep adding a little each year. 🙂 Here is a preview of what you can find in this comprehensive unit. Obviously, it’s a little much for one unit, but I like to have options so I don’t get bored from year to year. 🙂 I pick and choose to spice things up.
Every year I am sure to do this Hat creativity though! Students decorate the front of a winter hat. Inside they choose an animal from the book and choose a describing word. The fill in the sentence: The (animal) looked (adjective) in the (clothing item).
This is one of my favorite activities. Jan Brett always uses great action verbs. For this activity, students will choose the best verb to go with each sentence.
I recently added a few pages too! I’m SUPER excited about these updates. I love looking at an author’s craft and helping kids to see their common characteristics and style in their books. I made this menu to use as a class, independent menu (for 2nd/3rd,) or small group activity. I recommend doing each activity as a class first using different Jan Brett books. Then, you could introduce the menu and have students use one book to look back on for evidence of all these things in the menu.
This photo shows an option for using more than one book. You could also blow this up to be a poster and fill it in as a class after reading your books.
These are pages to use with the menu. There are at least two options for each.
I also added a few pages for the story, The Three Snow Bears. I had one more page for The Mitten to use with a close reading lesson too. 🙂
