Visited the Academy of Notre Dame today

Lovely visit today with the librarians, Victoria Abens, and Mary Buxton, and the Middle School students at the Academy of Notre Dame in Villanova, PA.

Beautiful day for a drive north to the Philadelphia area.
Enthusiastic students and teachers, great question and answer session.
I feel inspired to keep writing.
-wendieO

School Visit - Lowell School

I really enjoyed my visit to the Lowell School's Family Night on Tuesday. (Do click on the link. It's a lovely campus.)

I was so anxious about traveling to Washington, DC, in the middle of rush hour traffic during a rainy day, that I left my house north of Baltimore two hours early. Was I surprised when I discovered that I was moving against the rush hour traffic. I arrived over an hour early! That meant I could sit in the parking lot and read a book until closer to the time to show up.

Getting into the school was an adventure. I take two suitcases along to my school visits. One contains a 2 foot model of the Wright brothers' first airplane. The other contains the rest of my supplies. So there I was, trudging up the hill with my train of suitcases, looking for the handicapped entrance. Only to be met with stairs and more stairs. Finally a parent took pity on me and helped me up the stairs. (There was an elevator, but it was run by a key and nobody could find the person with the key. The key person escorted me when I was ready to leave at the end of the program.)

This evening was a huge book sale to benefit some of the reconstruction and expansion of the school. As the featured author, I gave two talks about books and writing and read parts of several books. Since the age ranged from preschool to middle school, it's lucky that i write for various ages and had a variety of books to show. What a great audience they were.

A big thank-you to Holly Johnson for organizing my visit to this event. And to all the other people who picked up the reins when she had to attend a family event, instead of this school event. -wendie old

Pine Grove El School visit

Friday, I talked to four groups of 4th and 5th graders at Pine Grove Elementary in Maryland about my adventures researching my books. Since it was the last day before spring break, the last group of the day reminded me of the class in High School Musical, waiting for school to get out for summer break. I felt like bursting into that song -- if only I could have remembered the words, I probably would have.

This is the school my oldest grandchild attends, so I didn't charge them my usual fee. It's only a block or two from my home. All of my children have attended school here. But since they had budgeted for my visit, I asked them to donate whatever they had planned to pay me to the school library. As I was setting up for the talks, the school librarian, Mrs. Ambridge, told me that not only had she been given the money, but she'd already spent it!

Good! I'm glad.
This is one of the best schools in Baltimore County, Maryland, (in my opinion) and I'm glad to be able to pay them back in this minor way for all the wonderful advantages they've given all my children. My oldest went on from here to become a pharmacist. The next child was encouraged to develop her artistic talent here, and my 10-year-old grandchild is excelling in music.

Besides, it was fun to see the neighborhood children, who have grown up with the 10-year-old, interacting in a school setting.
Thank you Mrs. Lauren Moore for inviting me to visit Pine Grove.
-wendie old

School visits to remember

Since it's almost time for the kids to go back to school, I was reminded of some of the school visits I've made over the years. (In fact, I've mentioned a couple on my blog.)

I love visiting schools.
Every spring I visit the local schools wearing my librarian hat and representing the public library to tell the students (and teachers) about this year's Summer Reading Program. I also bring along a selection of neat books that I think the kids would enjoy reading for fun. I fully believe that summer reading should be FUN!

Do I ever talk about my own books at these school visits? Hardly ever. Wellllll, if I have a new book out I might show it to one of the classes if I think they'd enjoy it. But these are library visits, not me-me-me-the-author.

And then there are school visits that I make with my author hat on.
I love doing these, too. (I've come to the conclusion that I'm a ham. I'm basically shy, but when I do have something to talk about, I'm a ham.)
It so much fun to arrive at a school and find it is all decked out with student's interpretations of my books. One school a few years ago had adopted the slogan -- Fly High with Books -- and had plastered the school with it. They had no idea that that's what I put into every copy of TO FLY, THE STORY OF THE WRIGHT BROTHERS when I sign them. Wow! Great minds with but a single thought. I was blown away.

And then there are the disasters.
Most memorable was year I took 3 to 4 hours driving through a blinding white-out snowstorm to travel to a school near Washington, DC -- a trip that should have taken an hour and a half at the most. When I realized that traffic on I-95 was stopped dead because no one could see, I began calling the school -- and nobody answered. For an hour, as traffic crept along, nobody answered. When they finally realized someone was trying to call them, I got the distinct impression that they didn't believe me. After all, the snowstorm had left their area, only leaving a dusting of snow.

From then on, whenever a school near DC asks me to come, I make sure I get the school secretary's phone number and I state over and over again that I really, really will try to get there on time, but you know how the traffic on the DC beltway often is a traffic jam....

Anywho, all this is leading up to Marc Tyler Nobleman recent blog entries where he has posted about his 10 most memorable school visit moments. Only a few are disasters. The rest are typical of some of the wonderful interactions we all get with students and teachers when we are the 'author' visiting their school.
-wendieO

This week in writing

I haven't posted much this week because I was completing the application for the Vermont College Picture Book Certificate Program. This is a one semester course that can be taken separately from the whole MFA course at Vermont College of Fine Arts. (I probably will never be able to take the whole course, but this one part of it speaks to me.)

And I probably won't be reviewing a nonfiction book tomorrow because I'll be doing a "Babies Love Books" program Monday morning, then preparing for a School Visit on Tuesday. No, not as an author. This is part of my job as a Children's Librarian in a public library system. We all go to the local schools and talk up the Summer Reading Program (Bugs, Bugs, Bugs!) and also suggest great new books the kids could read to reach their summer goal of reading 10 books.

Yes, I said bugs.
(Lucky for me, spiders are NOT bugs/ insects.)
Maryland has joined the National Summer Reading Program and the theme this year is Insects -- CATCH THE READING BUG!
We're even going to have a butterfly cage where caterpillars turn into butterflies before your very eyes. I can't wait.

Just opening the boxes of Summer Reading Program supplies gives me a thrill -- it's just like Christmas.

-wendieO

School visit pictures

Here are a few pictures of me in full throttle, doing a school visit as an author at Arnold Elementary School in Arnold Maryland in 2007. With any luck, this link should take you to a web page that shows more of this visit.

Thanks to Jan Smith, the Library Media Specialist, for creating this web page. (and for taking me to lunch at a great riverside restaurant.)

(If anyone can tell me how to put pictures into the middle of these messages, instead of them all piling up at the top , I'd appreciate it.) -wendieO