Jan Brett Author Study

 

With over 30 million books in print around the world, Jan Brett is one of the leading children’s authors and illustrators.  Her love for bringing beautifully detailed, imaginative worlds to life has blossomed into a catalog of literary creations that captivate audiences around the globe. With such a wide selection of popular titles to choose from, Jan Brett is a wonderful writer and illustrator to focus on for an author study in your classroom. 

Popular Jan Brett Titles 

Jan Brett often pulls inspiration for her books from her travels and adventures to foreign countries. Many of her winter titles show the influence of Scandinavian and Artic folklore and themes: 

• The Mitten is a colorful picture book that does a classic retelling of the young boy who loses his mitten in the snow-covered woods. The author adds nuance and depth to the story through small details illustrated around the border of the depiction of the main action.
• The Three Snow Bears is a fun Artic adaptation of the classic story of the three little bears. A young Inuit girl happens upon the igloo home of the snow bears and mischief and adventure ensue.
• Trouble with Trolls introduces the reader to Treva, a tough and quick witted young heroine, intent on saving her dog from the clutches of mountain dwelling trolls. 

Author Study Activities 

Author interviews are a great way to discover new details about writers, while gaining perspective and insight into their works. I have found many fun ways to integrate author interviews into the classroom. Two of my favorites are viewing a clip or video of the author being interviewed, or personally dressing up as the author and actively engaging students in a question and answer session. The latter requires some advance preparation to make sure you are ready to answer student-posed questions. After either activity, I like to give students the opportunity to reflect and record their discoveries by crafting a news story sharing the details of the interview.

Comparing and contrasting elements of a variety of the author’s stories is a wonderful way to examine common themes, plot lines and other relevant story elements or book features. One of my favorite ways to do this is to create preprogrammed index cards with the titles of the books to be compared, as well as a variety of elements and features. Possible index cards could be: The Three Snow Bears, The Trouble with Trolls, illustrations, theme, characters, setting, etc. I would gather my students in a circle surrounding two hula-hoops. Using the hula-hoops as a giant physical Venn diagram, we would hold compare and contrast discussions. As we changed the topic being discussed, we would move the corresponding index cards into place. For example, the book titles would be placed under either hoop or “circle”, and the setting would be placed in the common center while we discussed commonalities in the settings of the titles. 

Author Mobiles are a crafty way for students to organize the facts and figures related to the author being studied. I like to provide an array of black and white printed images of characters from a range of the author’s books. Students would choose four images. They would then record a fact about the author on the back of three of the images, and their personal favorite title by the author on the fourth image. The images could then be colored or decorated and affixed together to create a mobile.   

Jan Brett Web Resources

The Jan Brett website hosts a wide variety of web resources to extend on and explore her work, as well as support core content acquisition. These resources include, but are not limited to, activities, printables, cards, coloring pages, games, videos and contests.

More Jan Brett Author Study Lessons:

Jan Brett Encyclopedia Lesson 

After listening to any of the Jan Brett stories, students are introduced to the concept of research as a way to inspire creative writing. They choose an animal from one of Jan Brett's titles to investigate using reference materials. The lesson includes attached worksheets to support all activities. 

Integrating the Internet: Jan Brett Author Study 

By using resources found on the Jan Brett website, students complete a wonderful range of relevant activities including creating character masks, charting pertinent geographical locations, and exploring non-fiction facts about the animals in her tales. They then create an interactive annotated webliography or book list using any available multimedia presentation software.  

“Talking” to Jan Brett 

As the culmination of a six to eight week author study of Jan Brett comes to an end, the class develops a letter to the author. Their letter is reflective of the information they've learned, as well as essential questions they've developed. The author's email is included so the finished letter could be emailed to Jan Brett. Although the thematic unit is not attached or linked to, it is summarized thoroughly at the beginning of the lesson providing a rich array of supplementary activity ideas.