Dr. Seuss and Essential Questions

In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday on March 2, we did an in depth author study of Dr. Seuss.  Our study was guided by the essential question, "How do we recognize a book by Dr. Seuss without reading the author's name on the cover?"

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue, in their quintessential book, Understanding by Design (1998) (UbD) propose that every student be able to answer an essential question at the end of a unit of study.  The question should be written so that students have the opportunity to demonstrate multiple layers of understanding in their answers. The unit is designed in a backwards fashion - that means that the question guides the unit of study.  Essential questions should be broad, but paradoxically, they also focus the study.  When I design a question, I look at the outcome I desire prior to designing the question.  In a well-designed study, students are actively involved in finding the answer to the question. 

In order to answer our essential question, "How do we recognize a book by Dr. Seuss without reading the author's name on the cover?", students studied the writing and illustrations of a wide selection of Dr. Seuss books.

They read Dr. Seuss books extensively in small group, individually, in pairs, during reading and writer's workshop, and during shared reading.  They needed opportunities to discover what made Dr. Seuss books different from many of the other books they read, and they needed to be able to back up their claims with evidence from a Dr. Seuss book. 

Here is some of our shared writing that documented students' answers to our essential questions:

This is the written text of our shared writing:

The settings are made up.  The houses have slanted and unusual shapes.  Some of the tops of the trees are puffy and some are pointy.

Everything is pretend like there is a green sun in Wacky Wednesday and the table has animal feet in There's a Wocket in My Pocket.

Some of the characters have fuzzy, furry collars like Sam-I-Am.

There's a lot of rhyming words.  In Horton Hears a Who!, on the first page,  there's "sound" and "around" and "yelp" and "help."

Dr. Seuss uses the same words over and over again.  In Green Eggs and Ham on page 33, the words are, "A train! A train! A train! A train!".  In The Foot Book it says, "Left Foot, Left Foot, Left Foot, Right!"