This document summarizes a classroom's author study on Jan Brett. It discusses several key elements that often appear in Brett's stories, such as elaborate borders, animal characters, cold winter settings, and foreign or historical settings. It then summarizes the plots of several of Brett's books and describes activities the class did related to those books, such as acting out stories, making props, reading other books by the author, and inviting a guest illustrator to visit.

1. Jan Brett Author Study

2. We chose to study Jan Brett because many of her stories take place in cold, snowy
places. Little did we know that we were about to experience the snowiest winter in
Philadelphia history!
The children figured out that Jan Brett likes to have certain elements in many of her
books:
• She creates elaborate borders that often tell part of the story.
• Many of her characters are animals.
• Her stories often take place in cold, snowy places.
• Many of her stories are set in places far away from Philadelphia and some
happened long ago.

3. In Annie and The Wild Animals, Annie can’t find her cat.

4. Annie decides to bake some corn cakes and leave them in the woods
to try to attract a new pet.

5. Making Corn Cakes

6. “Snow” and Ice Play

7. “Real”
Snow
and Ice

8. All this talk about ice and snow made us very
curious about icebergs and glaciers.

9. The animals who came to eat Annie’s corn cakes were much too big and
wild to be pets.

10. Acting out the story

11. When a giant moose comes to Annie’s window, she gives up her plan. Luckily, her cat and some
new baby kittens come back home to Annie.

12. In The Hat, Hedgie gets a sock stuck on his head.

13. Hedgie tells his animal friends that he’s wearing a new hat.

14. Hedgie’s friends take all the clothes off the clothesline to create hats like his.

16. In The Trouble With
Trolls, Treva is
skiing over the
mountain with her
dog Tuffi. Some
troublesome trolls
keep trying to
steal her dog.

17. Trolls!

18. The World of the Trolls

19. Trolls in their underground world

21. In The Mitten, Nicki loses his brand new white mitten made by his grandmother.

22. A few passing animals decided to crawl
inside to stay warm.

23. Eventually, the mitten gets very crowded!

24. Recreating the story

25. Making Mittens

26. We then read Jan Brett’s
most delicious selections,
Gingerbread Friends and
Gingerbread Baby.

27. So, of course, we made our own
gingerbread dough to play with.

28. Then we made
some
gingerbread
cookies of our
own to eat.

29. In the story
Hedgie’s
Surprise, a
troublesome
Tomten steals
eggs from
Hedgie’s
friend, Henny.

30. He continues to steal eggs until
one day he grabs a handful of
hedgehog!

31. So we decided to have
some “egg” fun of our own!

32. Toss your egg into the nest!

33. We got to meet a
“real” illustrator
who read us
some
of her favorite
books.

34. We created
illustrations
of our own.

35. We were happy to meet “Hedgie” and to make hedgehogs we could eat!

36. We had fun playing the
Jan Brett board game.

37. We watched a movie about
Jan Brett and she showed us how
to make hedgehogs

38. We made
some hedgehogs
and we sent
them to
Jan Brett with a
letter.
We hope she
writes back
to us.