Throughout history there have been people who loved studying, collecting, and organizing words like Jerome. Keep a class list of these dynamic characters that grows throughout the year. What do these characters have in common? How are they different? Which characters are models for how we want to live our lives and why? Then, encourage students to notice and name dynamic characters in other books in your classroom library or that they have read at home. ![]() You can extend your class study with other books written about at The Classroom Bookshelf like Kobi Yamada’s What Do You Do With a Chance? and Dan Santat’s After the Fall: How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again. You may want to start with other characters from Reynolds’ picturebooks like Raymond and Marisol ( Ish ), Vashti ( The Dot ), Raj ( Playing from the Heart ) and some of his unnamed characters as seen in books like Happy Dreamer, I’m Here, and I Am Peace. What makes a character dynamic and worthy of emulation? After exploring students’ ideas, deepen their understanding by inviting them to engage in character comparisons. Engage students in an inquiry about dynamic characters that serve as mentors for how we want to live our own lives. In this way, Jerome serves as a mentor for building a life of joyful purpose. He knows that he loves words and he is self-driven in his commitment to collecting and cataloguing them. Jerome is a character with complexity and agency. ![]() Teaching Ideas: Invitations for Your Classroomsĭynamic Character Comparisons. The Word Collector offers teachers a fresh opportunity for a joyous read-aloud as part of a literacy celebration and can serve as a touchstone text for nearly any unit of study that positions students to be wordenthuasiasts and wordsmiths. Intentionally illustrated as a young boy of color, Jerome continues Reynolds’ commitment to diverse representations of society, and of children, specifically, as seen through his previous characters like Vashti ( The Dot ) and Marisol ( Ish and Sky Color ). By looking beneath the book jacket, readers will be surprised to find an array of words covering the front and back cover that invite eager eyes to get closer and spot new words. The book as a whole is a celebration of ”short and sweet words, two-syllable treats, and multi-syllabic words”, but the book is also a celebration of the process of discovery as readers are invited to find words in the text that they themselves want to collect. As a logophile, Jerome models for readers the visionary idea that we all have the power to be collectors by paying attention to what we hear, see, and read in the world. Deeply attuned to how children naturally operate in the world, Reynolds refers early in the text to the ways children tend to collect things–coins, baseball cards, bugs–and brings to life a character that offers an alternative approach by collecting words. Reynolds continues his trend of crafting seemingly simple text with significant and lasting meaning, this time with an overtly literacy-specific message: words are worthy of collecting. Written and Illustrated by Peter Reynoldsįans of Peter Reynolds’ Ish, The Dot, and Happy Dreamer, will be delighted by his latest picturebook, The Word Collector.
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