Author Study

Jan Brett

Mary Hanley School

Mrs. Hackman's 

Kindergarten Main Page

We choose Jan Brett because most of her stories were in the winter and of course here in Edmonton we have a very long winter.  Another reason is that many of the animals in her stories are animals native to Alberta.  Lastly, we chose it because we all love Hedgie and we wanted to read all the books he is in.

Part of our project was to do research  on the animals in The Mitten.  Our Grade Four neighbours helped us with this project.  We used a simple webbing sheet where we filled in information on an animal.

A fellow colleague had another version of the mitten story entitled The Old Man's Mitten (Publisher: Bookshelf ISBN 0 7253 0806 0).  We read this story as well and compared the two stories.  We created a large Venn Diagram showing the similarities and differences between the two stories.

And of course we visited Jan Brett's website (www.janbrett.com).  The children enjoyed looking at all the various activities. We also decorated a gingerbread house for The Gingerbread Baby on the website.  We decorated our own gingerbread house and gingerbread baby.