Mother's Day and Father's Day Project

One of my best projects was creating our own picture books for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. We first read the two picture books by Jennifer Fosberry and Mike Litwin – My Name is Not Alexander and My Name is not Isabella. In these books the main characters pretend to be a historical person from the past. Each book covers five people from history. At the end, the child pretends to be mom or dad. So, my students researched five historical people to include in their books. Then we wrote the story and illustrated the books. Finally, my students decided which parent to include in the story and that is the parent they gave the picture book to. My parents cherished the books.

Here are some students of my student’s books.

My favorite part of this project is every time the students wrote about a historical figure they had to incorporate language in the text that went with that person. For example, if the character was Ronald Reagan, a sentence would include presidential words like power, chief, leader, etc. It really makes students think about which words represent the person (language of the discipline, too). I hope this gives you all some good ideas!