Fruit Street School
Every visiting author loves a welcome sign.
The third grade made lovely little cards to greet me! This artist’s card was prescient–of course I liked them!
This card reads: “Welcome Sarah Thomson to our school. I hope you have fun Sarah Thomson.” I did! I’m glad kids know visits are fun for me as well as for them.
Last week I spent two wonderful days as a visiting author with the kids at Fruit Street School in Bangor. What a fulfilling sense of normalcy, to be back to seeing kids face to face, reading, talking, and connecting! The pre-k and kindergarten classes and I bonded over wombats and wallabies, and with the first, second, and third grades we discussed how long the longest snakes are and how to structure a nonfiction book. Delightful!
Read MoreHow to Do a School Visit Right
The author’s parking spot!
Last week I went to Biddeford Intermediate School to talk with the third, fourth, and fifth graders about poetry. If you want to try being a rock star for a day, you should be the visiting author at Biddeford Intermediate.
They reserve a parking space out front “for the author.” All the kids line up to clap as you walk into the building. (For real!) They brought me snacks (yes, I am a sucker for chocolate) and an actual gift bag with goodies and a new blank book and a gorgeous pair of earrings. !!!
Wow! And I needed a new journal. How did they know?
This sounds like a school just needs to offer me earrings and chocolate to melt my heart. (This is partly true. Earrings are optional.) But it’s not the whole story.
The kids just vibrated with excitement when they came into my workshops. They called my name in the hall and waved and a few of them jumped up and down. When I made eye contact their faces glowed. They were excited about words, about books, about poetry. Their teachers treat a visiting author like a celebrity and that fills the kids up with passion for writing and art and creativity.
The kids wrote incredible poetry.
Some of the poetry the kids created, based on the images from Imagine a Night. This was before I even arrived!
That’s why the gifts and the parking space and the chocolate are important–not because I need these things to enjoy a school visit (although, again, chocolate does not hurt) but because they are visible symbols of the commitment of the teachers at BIS to helping their kids care about literature. They are the real rock stars.
Talking about The Eureka Key at Victor Intermediate
This week I visited Victor Intermediate School in Victor, NY, a lovely little hamlet near Rochester. What made it super exciting to me was that this school had picked The Eureka Key for a community read. It was my first time (as far as I know) to be read by an entire school (of 1100 kids, no less).
Now normally I’m in a favor of a LOT of choice when it comes to reading. We’re not all the same as readers; let’s let the nonfiction kids read about dinosaurs and the fantasy kids read about dragons and the sensitive kids read tearjerkers. It’s all reading! It’s all good!
But I have to admit to a certain thrill in having a shared experience of reading every now and then. It was part of what made the Harry Potter phenomenon so fun. It wasn’t that they were the best books in the world (not the worst, either). It was the joy of sharing Hogwarts with so many other people. With your friends and classmates and strangers you met on the bus. It brought the fictional world into real life, joined us together into a community who shared our imaginary lives. It was lovely.
I felt a little bit of that in the school today. The kids were so excited to see me and so eager to take in what I had to share about writing and so excited to do some writing themselves. And sharing the book with the whole school, kids and teachers and families and all, was what built that excitement.
I signed A LOT of books!
Everybody made their own “Eureka Keys” with terms describing themselves–the keys to their personalities!
Chenery Book Festival
Here I am with my fellow festival-ites! Ammi-Joan Paquette, on left, specifically requested that we not mention how she is holding her book upside down and backwards….so I won’t.
Had a lovely time yesterday at the Chenery Book Festival in Belmont, MA, where the dogwoods are blooming. The only drawback was that so many kids and parents wanted to drop by to talk about books that I didn’t get enough of a chance to hobnob with my fellow authors!
This reader didn’t want her face to show in the photo. But how cool to meet a reader whose shirt matches your book!
I did have some happy chat with poet Teresa Millstein (you know how some poets just look like they’re poets? She’s one of those) and novelist Tara Sullivan (I took home her remarkable and harrowing The Bitter Side of Sweet.) This fabulous festival held at Chenery Middle School and organized by super librarian Karen Duff (seriously, where’s her cape?) gets better every year!
Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Readers will treasure the blossoming friendship between opposites in this whimsically illustrated tale. Short chapters and plenty of action make for an accessible and appealing reading experience. . . . Touching and inspiring.”
—Kirkus Reviews