Month: March 2011

Did you read aloud to someone today?  It was World Read Aloud Day, you know...an international event put together by LitWorld…and oh, what a day!

A few weeks ago, Karla Duff, a teacher in Iowa, sent me a note on Twitter asking if I’d be game to read aloud to her students via Skype for the big day.  Later on, I noticed other teachers on Twitter were looking for authors to read-aloud, too – and since I wear two hats — teacher and writer — it was easy for me to help with that and make some introductions.  The result… a list of more than thirty authors who’d volunteered their time for Skype read-alouds to celebrate World Read Aloud Day! And boy, did teachers ever take them up on that offer!

Because today was a teaching day for me, too, I shared some video read-alouds of my new & upcoming books online (you can still see them here!) and did one Skype chat during my lunch hour.

Karla’s school was delayed due to ice & snow, so I posted a quick note on Twitter, and Katherine Sokolowski swooped in to claim the Skype visit for her 5th grade reading class.  I showed the kids my new book SUGAR AND ICE as well as my upcoming spring/summer releases, MARTY MCGUIRE and SEAMONSTER’S FIRST DAY.  And then I showed them the messy, marked-up stack of papers I was about to deliver to UPS…copy edits for my 2012 novel EYE OF THE STORM.

The kids voted on which one they wanted  me to read.  Any guesses?

It was the messy, marked-up EYE OF THE STORM manuscipt!  I shared a couple pages with them before we all went to eat lunch.

Some authors from the list made three, four, five, or MORE dates for World Read Aloud Day!

Author Laurel Snyder ended up Skyping into six classrooms before her day was through. Donna Gephart had a busy day, too – her blog post about it is called “Six Schools, Five States, and One Pair of Bunny Slippers!”

Kelly Moore’s classes in Ontario hooked up with authors Lee Garretson and Ruth Spiro for online read-alouds.

Kelly’s team made the celebration last all day long.  In addition to the author Skype read-alouds, it included a Book Lovers Breakfast, Book Swap, Reading Buddies, Guest Parent Readers, Collaborative Book Making with Grades 1 & 4, and a Character Convention where students and teachers dressed up as favorite book characters.  Here are Kelly,  Charlotte Cornel, and Stephanie Martin) who dressed as Robert Munsch’s Paperbag Princesses!

If you have other photos or stories of World Read Aloud Day posted online, please feel free to share a link to them in the comments!

Thanks to everyone who shared photos for this post…and to LitWorld and all the teachers & authors who made magic happen for kids today. One teacher emailed me tonight and said one of her students summed it up best. “I wish every day could be like this.”

March 9th is World Read Aloud Day — a holiday that might not make it onto every calendar, but it sure is circled on mine.  Reading aloud has always been a big deal to me…from my toddler days when I’d stalk my parents’ dinner guests with a big pile of books in my arms to now, when I read aloud to kids both at home and at school every day.

I shared a lot more thoughts on reading aloud last spring, in this open letter to the Association of Booksellers for Children, when The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. won the E.B. White Read Aloud Award.  But right now…what I’d really like to do is read.

Here are three videos of me reading aloud in my living room.  No fancy cameras, no lights, no makeup…just a fireplace, a flipcam and three books.  (One of them, SUGAR AND ICE, came out in December, but the other two aren’t out yet, so you’re getting a special WRAD sneak preview!)  So get yourself a cup of hot chocolate or a carton of milk (I’m guessing some of you are watching at school today) and enjoy.

No matter who you are or where you are, I hope you’ll share a book with someone today, too!

I’m looking out the window at nearly two feet of new snow tonight, but before this latest winter storm hit, we got a welcome taste of spring in Montreal this weekend.

Butterflies Go Free is an annual event at the Montreal Botanical Gardens. Thousands of butterflies — almost all from butterfly farms in Costa Rica — are hatched in the main greenhouse, where visitors young and old can walk among them. It was especially fun to see the Blue Morpho butterflies this year.

We wondered if any of these were relatives of the butterflies we’d seen in the rain forest in Costa Rica this summer!

The butterflies were stunning — moths, too — and spending a couple hours with them made me feel like Spring isn’t so far away. Here are a few more photos…just in case you’re still shoveling out, too!

Remember…on the calendar at least…just two more weeks until Spring!