When I was at the IBBY World Congress in August, I had a chance to hear Jon Klassen speak.
In my reflection on his talk (which I attended late), I said:
Jon Klassen is hilarious. I need to make sure I own all of his books, either for myself or for my school library.
I have been not-so-slowly buying all his books for my personal collection, because I have been inspired to do an author study on Jon Klassen with my junior division ESL students.
Jon's books are the perfect choice for my 9-11 year old multilingual learners. It's "edgy" enough to make it a fun picture book read for older children. It also encourages lots of discussion and English comments thrown out during the read aloud. We began with I Want My Hat Back. Who took the hat? What happened to the rabbit? Unsolicited, several students offered their opinions.
We then used some loose parts to show initial understanding about the plot and characters of the book. It was clear to me who understood the story.
The next day, we did what sounds pretty impressive - a character analysis. Really, what we did was listed the characters, made some silhouettes (which were clear about who represented what, thanks to Klassen's simple but evocative style), and used sticky notes to write sentences about the characters.
This coming week, we are going to practice retelling the story (or doing readers theatre with everyone assigned parts). We are also going to have some intense debates - for instance, some of them wrote that "Bear is bad". Is he?
I'm looking forward to reading This Is Not My Hat. I will probably prepare a vocabulary sheet with some nouns and verbs that might help them (e.g. fish / stole / wake / notice / plants / crab).
Please note that I'm not using any pre-made TPT packages or AI creations. Klassen's work just lends itself naturally to organic, authentic responses.
The icing on the cake? Jon Klassen is Canadian. November 4, 2026 was I Read Canadian Day, so it's fitting that we are focusing on one of many talented Canadian authors.
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