Celebrating An Author's Birthday!

My class had all sorts of fun this week as we celebrated the birthday of a famous author who can't be named!

First up, our amazing cafeteria cook organized green eggs and ham for the whole school and community members to come in and read each class the story!  The kids were especially excited, because they got to eat in the classroom!  We had a local fireman and a bank teller read to our class - it was so fun!  Also, my teaching partner and I used this freebie and dressed up like Teacher 1 and Teacher 2!

Notice the pretty dandelion behind my ear that a student gave me?

Then we used some awesome units to help us explore the author's books and learn about the author's life:

This pack can be used for any author, which makes it so versatile!  I love it!

 This pack has awesome literacy centers that can be used for any time of the year.  It's a fun birthday theme, so it would also be cute to use them during the week that you celebrate summer birthdays in your room!

We also did this fun craft to celebrate the author's birthday!  It has fun writing prompts, too.  We hung our cakes and writing outside on our clothes line, and the kids loved coming up and looking at them at recess!

At the end of the week, after learning all about the author and his books, each child chose his or her favorite book and wrote an opinion paper on why they thought it was the best!  We used my new writing pack In My Honest Opinion!

We used one of the graphic organizers to write out the reasons and evidence to support our opinions.  We wrote our essays, using transition words, on the lined paper, then cut it out, and assembled the phone.  Kids loved that they got to pretend talking on their big phone as they re-read for clarity!

Here is a close up of one of the completed projects.

Here they are hanging outside with our standard clearly stated for admin ;)

Here is a freebie for you, to help you get started on opinion writing.  Head on over to my TpT store to purchase the full unit!

Do you like to celebrate authors' birthdays?