Celebrating Children’s Book Week at Peru Intermediate

I spent my Children’s Book Week Wednesday at an extra-special school visit. All this month, the kids at Peru Intermediate School are reading my Lake Champlain historical novels, Spitfire and Champlain and the Silent One with their teachers, while they read other books at home to work toward meeting personal reading goals for the month.  Today, I gave presentations to the third, fourth, and fifth grade classes.

Here are some very enthusiastic third graders.

The kids all had terrific questions, and when I left the presentation area, I found a surprise…

Hallways with beautiful student artwork, inspired by Spitfire and Champlain and the Silent One!  This is one of the things they don’t tell you about when you are about to have a book published…how some day, you’ll be walking down a school hallway and see the scenes you wrote brought to life in color by amazing young artists.  This has happened to me a few times now, and every time, I fight back tears. (Good ones… so thanks, Peru kids!)

This illustration shows a scene where some of the members of Silent One’s tribe are sick from eating flesh from an old pig carcass they found at the French settlement.  My favorite part? Silent One’s speech bubble… "I told you not to eat the meat."

After my two morning presentations, it was time for a luncheon in the library, where I ate cookies, talked with kids about their favorite books, and signed lunch napkins and books (most that I had written and one that I didn’t, but its owner insisted that I sign anyway).  Really, lunch time doesn’t get much better than that.

I’m looking forward to one more visit to Peru Intermediate at the end of this month, when we’ll be celebrating meeting our reading goals and giving away books.  For now…it’s time for me curl up with tonight’s reading.  I still have three more books in my pile to reach my goal!