Look what the UPS guy brought this week! He looked at me a little funny when I hugged him. Do you suppose most people don’t do that? Champlain and the Silent One, my historical novel about an Innu boy who travels with Samuel de Champlain on his 1609 voyage to encounter the Iroquois, is officially out…
Guess what?? I’m going on a field trip tomorrow! (I know that makes me sound like a third grader, but I love field trips just as much as a teacher as I did when I was a kid.) We’re taking our 7th graders to the river to release the baby salmon that they raised from…
Talk about an interested, enthusiastic group of readers! I spent a terrific day with the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders at Ogdensburg’s Madill Elementary School last week. They had great questions during my visit and sent me even more questions & comments today, and I promised them a blog post. Curious minds want to know……
Inspired by a few recent posts offering advice on school visits, I’m adding one of my own shortcuts to the list of tips for LJ writer friends. SurveyMonkey is a free, online tool that allows you to create surveys that you can send to teachers and librarians after a school visit. I used the site…
Yesterday was one of those school visit days that writers dream about when their first book is released. I spent the day at Madill and Kennedy Elementary Schools in Ogdensburg, NY and spoke to about 400 4th, 5th, and 6th graders — all of whom had read at least part of Spitfire. My morning drive…
If you’ve spent any time around middle school kids, you know they devour Jim Murphy’s works of nonfiction. Murphy has won two Newbery Honors for his books The Great Fire and An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. His latest book, The Real Benedict Arnold, was brought…
I took the train to Manhattan Thursday for the NYS English Council Conference, a one-day event held right before NCTE. My presentation, “Walking the Walk: How Teacher-Writers Can Encourage Student Revision” was well-attended and fun to present because it featured so many of my writer friends from LJ and Verla’s. I shared my own revision…
I spent Thursday and Friday at the NYS Reading Association Conference in Saratoga Springs. Here’s a roundup of the highlights… 1. The Authors Progressive Banquet was fun and stress-free. I didn’t even spill anything. I was a little concerned about how the logistics would work, because the authors start the evening at one table and…
“Please pick me! Please pick me!” said the snowflake…one of more than a hundred being auctioned off for the Robert’s Snow: For Cancer’s Cure Fundraiser. Today, we feature this colorful creation by illustrator Sara Kahn and offer blog readers a chance to win one of her books and a signed Giclee print of a painting…
Two kinds of SNOW news today! First of all…it snowed in the Adirondacks Saturday night, so my drive down Interstate 87 to the Chronicle Book Fair in Glens Falls, NY was stunning — blazing red, orange, and yellow fall foliage, mixed with sugar-snow mountaintops in the distance. I arrived at the book fair content that…
