Last week I introduced my kids to one of my absolute favourite aussie authors and illustrators - Nick Bland. Oh. My. Word. They are just as in love with him as I am! Here are some of the books we love:
The books featuring that adorable brown bear are firm favourites and are quickly tucked into book boxes as soon as I've read them and placed them on the shelves. This week we are going to use Donald Loves Drumming to work on retelling and making personal responses and connections to texts.
The last book I will read by Nick Bland is The Magnificent Tree because it is illustrated by another one of my favourite aussie authors and illustrators - Stephen Michael King who I will introduce next. I love using his books to demonstrate 'voice' because his illustrations are so uniquely his and end up tying this in with our writing lessons.
We don't have time to do full-on author studies, but I do like to collect up books by authors and introduce them throughout the year. I then try to use them as mentor texts during reading and writing lessons. Throughout the year as new books are published by these authors the kids get super excited! They also love to borrow the books we've read from the school library. Yes, it can get a bit annoying when the 15th kid comes up and shows me a book by one of the authors EVERY library lesson, but hey, as least they are reading books by quality authors!
Besides Nick and Stephen, I've also introduced David Shannon. I'm also looking at doing Jeannie Baker, Eric Carle, Mem Fox, Jackie French, Julia Donaldson, Margaret Wild, Colin Thompson, Kevin Henkes and Dr Seuss.
Who else would you suggest??