Rewriting Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

The essential questions for this unit of study are:

How does reading help me become a better writer?

What can I learn from other authors and illustrators?

How can I make use of the craft of other authors and illustrators?

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

by

Bill Martin, Jr.

Illustrations by Eric Carle

I am going to begin my Authors as Mentors through Big Books quest with the text Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr.. My reasoning for this is:

This is a text all students know and love (familiarity and prior knowledge)

The structure is obvious (same words and rhythm throughout text)

The illustrations are simple, large, and bright

Text and pictures match (emphasizing picture-word match)

Color words are featured (first grade reading vocabulary)

When our class rewrites the text, the format (structure) will be easy to replicate.

When we replicate the text, we will use the following words:

Mrs.Brown, Mrs.Brown who do you see? I see ______looking at me! _______, __________, who do you see? I see _______looking at me.

We will use photos and self portraits to illustrate this book.

This text will support a Responsive Classroom approach (www.responsiveclassroom.org) by helping students learn identify one another. They will also be learning to read the text, be creating self portraits (supporting art and social studies) while rewriting text with a familiar pattern. Integration of multiple subject areas is a bonus and I integrate whenever possible. Below is the script and sequence of lessons with this big book.

Monday-teacher reads the book and students listen.

Tuesday-teacher and students read the book together. The students do a retell of the story.

Thursday-Students read the book chorally. I asked the following questions and got these responses from students:

Why do you think Bill Martin, Jr. wrote this book? (purpose)

Ø “He wanted kids to learn words.”

Ø “Yeah, like animals, colors, and people”

Who do you think he wrote the book for? (audience)

Ø “Children”

How do you know he wrote this book for children?

Ø “He chose animals and colors.”

Ø “He made everything big.”

What makes this story easy to read? (pattern, repetition)

Ø “Big letters.”

Ø “Pictures help”

Ø “You know what is coming.”

Do you think we could write a story like this?

Ø “Yes!”

We are going to make our own story like Bill Martin’s Brown Bear story tomorrow. Tomorrow we will write a book called, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Brown Who Do You See? It will go like this…

Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Brown who do you see? I see ______looking at me! _______, __________, who do you see? I see _______looking at me.

There were many more questions I could have asked about structure, illustrations, punctuation, etc. I wanted to keep this process very simple in the beginning. That is the reason I started with a familiar text.

Friday-The students read the text on their own (chorally). Then, I started the text on chart paper so they could see me writing…

Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Brown

Who do you see?

I see ________

Looking at me.

I selected a student helper’s name to put in the blank. Then the class chanted…

_________, _________,

Who do you see?

(The student replied)

I see _________

Looking at me.

We did this until every member of the classroom had been selected. While the chanting was going on, I was writing what was said.

I am hoping that the students will initiate the rewrites at some point but for this first time, I set up the text we would use.

Students did a drawing lesson with me on how to draw a self-portrait of their face. I made them small slips of paper with ovals on them. They watched me divide the oval into four parts (left, right, top, bottom). I showed them how to make eyes, nose and mouth on each side of the face using the dividing line as a guide. I talked just a bit about symmetry. Students were then sent off to draw their faces (with a photo of them for support) and color them with colored pencils. I helped those with motor needs.

Once the self-portraits were done, I typed up the story and printed it out. I had also printed wallet size photos of each student (I had taken photos earlier).

The printed text was glued into a blank hard cover book along with the self portraits and the photos to aid the reader (picture/name connection).

The book will be housed in the classroom library once it is completed (we had two absent students) for students to read and refer to as a mentor text.

I have scanned the beginning of the book with my self-portrait so you could see what our book looks like. The child’s photo is at the bottom of the page but for protection purposes, I have left the photo out.