I keep my students engaged, that’s the baseline. My rule is that if I’m bored, they’re bored, and if they’re bored, we’ve got a problem. So I’m hard to surprise on engagement. This Bill Peet author study surprised me anyway.
I had students begging for “Bill Peet time.” Parents told me their kids shared the project at home and chose to work on it instead of their iPads. The wild part is how simple the project actually was. Once you see it, you might be surprised too.
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WHY BILL PEET?
As we left for spring break, we’d been learning to write literary essays, using our Civil Rights book club books for content and building theses around a strong theme. I called those “practice” essays: messy, heavily scaffolded, students’ first real exposure to the parts of an essay and a supporting paragraph.
I wanted to move them through that process again in 4th quarter, but I didn’t have time to wait for them to read another chapter book first. So I turned to picture books, specifically Bill Peet’s.
If you don’t know Bill Peet: he was a Walt Disney illustrator who left over creative differences, then started writing and illustrating the imaginative stories that had filled his own childhood. A big goal for this project was focusing on author’s purpose and author’s message, and Bill Peet came to mind immediately because I’d used his work for exactly that before.
THE BEST BILL PEET BOOKS FOR THIS STUDY
My longtime favorite is The Wump World, mostly because I’m a tree-hugger, it carries the same “take care of the Earth” warning as Just a Dream by Chris Van Allsburg. Through this study I also fell for several others. The ones I’d recommend gathering:
- The Wump World — environmental message, great for author’s message lessons
- The Spooky Tail of Prewitt Peacock
- Kermit the Hermit
- How Droofus the Dragon Lost His Head
- Eli
- Bill Peet: An Autobiography — worth having on hand if you do this study
LAUNCHING THE STUDY
I went to the local library and pulled every Bill Peet book off the shelf. We didn’t have a copy per child, so there was a lot of sharing. To launch, I gave students a simple handout and had them read as many books as they could get through in a week.
This part is a reading-stamina goldmine. The books are engaging, and kids on every reading level can feel safe reading them while still being pushed to think deeply about theme and message. (If I did it again, I’d let them just read for a week with no recording sheet, then add the sheet later, don’t let the worksheet get in the way of the reading.)
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TEACHING AUTHOR’S MESSAGE
This was the heart of the project. I taught students to figure out the author’s message, then to put clichéd lessons into their own words and read them back to check that they were (1) accurate to the story and (2) actually true.
A lesson I constantly get from students: “If you’re nice to someone, they’ll be nice back.” I challenge that hard. Is that really true? Does it always happen in real life? Is that what the author wanted us to learn? When the answer is no, we push to find better words for what the author was actually saying. That back-and-forth is where the real thinking happens.
(Since this was a 4th quarter project, students already had summaries, themes, and “It’s About” statements under their belts, which made the message work go deeper.)
THE ASSIGNMENT
After getting to know the stories, students chose one book to focus on in depth. I built the assignment in Google Slides and shared it as a download-only file.
Here’s the surprise: it was essentially a reader response, just done in an online word processor instead of pencil and paper. That’s it. That simple, and somehow deeply engaging to students. I didn’t let them touch the “fluffy” design stuff until the required pieces were done and I’d pushed them to add more and revise their sentences. Some students stopped at the required pieces and turned in something simple; others had time to elaborate, revise further, and dress it up. It never became a full essay this round, but that’s where I’d take it next.
WHAT I’D DO DIFFERENTLY
I loved this project enough that I’d build it into a repeatable structure: scaffold with Helen Lester books early in the year (great for the beginning of the year), then Bill Peet later, aiming for 2-3 author studies across the year.
There’s a lot to assess here. You could open with summaries, theme identification and support, and character analysis, take a benchmark with a read-aloud, use the projects to build skill, then give a final read-aloud-plus-passage assessment at the end. (Just set aside two picture books the students don’t use, so you have clean texts for the pre and post assessments.)
These end-of-year reflections always get my brain spinning on how to make a good thing better. If you haven’t reflected on your own year yet, it’s worth the time.
