Tomie dePaola Author Study Centers

I was so inspired by Nancy Jo Lambert's post about the Tomie dePaola author study centers she created for her second graders. I love Tomie dePaola's books and decided to do something similar for my first graders! This lesson took about an hour for each class.  For the first ten minutes, we talked about how having favorite authors means we can always find a good book to read! I also gave students directions for each center. Then I numbered the students and they spent ten minutes at each center. Last, we cleaned up, returned to the carpet, and talked about our favorite books and where we can find them in our library.

Here are each of the centers that our students rotated through.

Center 1: Meet Tomie on PebbleGo
Center 2: Read Tomie's books
Center 3: View Tomie's books (Choose a book from this Blendspace lesson.)
Center 4: Meet Strega Nona (Watch the Barnes and Noble Strega Nona video, narrated by Tomie himself, and color a Strega Nona puppet.)