Author Archives: Alexis

5 Things I’ve Learned About Doing School Visits: Kim Norman

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School visit season is over. Summer vacation is here. But keep your brain humming! Summer is a great time to reflect on what worked well for you last year and to think ahead to what you can implement in the next school year.  Here’s some advice from author and school visit expert, Kim Norman.

1. Sometimes kids forget why they have their hands up… and they are not offended if you tell them, “You can put your hands down now.”

 2. Even if the child posing a question has long, curly locks and a pink hair bow, I NEVER assume gender. Long-lashed boys with collar-length hair and pixie-haired tomboys in jeans can make gender a real guessing game. When I repeat a child’s question, (which I always do, to make sure everyone hears it) I no longer say, “He/she asked…” Now, I always say, “The question was…”

 3. Treats are not necessary. I used to offer treats (like stickers) for participation, but have found it’s unnecessary. After a few minutes, even “jaded” 5th and 6th graders are eager to participate. Also, the disappointment is too great for those who don’t win the treats.

 4. My presentations must be for the STUDENTS. I may toss in a rare occasional aside that teachers will enjoy, but I keep my interaction focused on the kids.

 5. Every school seems to have a clever “Mr. Jenkins” who knows how to make the microphones and projectors work. Mr. Jenkins is often at the other end of the building when you need him.

Kim Normanis the award-winning author of several picture books including TEN ON THE SLED (Sterling), IF IT’S SNOWY AND YOU KNOW IT, CLAP YOUR PAWS (Sterling), and I KNOW A WEE PIGGY (Dial). Kim has visited more than a hundred schools around the U.S. where she shares the joy of books and the humorous “horror” of her Evil Inner Editors. Her popular resource, Children’s Authors by State, provides a terrific service to teachers, librarians and parents who are hosting author visits.  

When a Volunteer Freezes

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 So, this kid waves his arm frantically. He is volunteering to come to the front of the school assembly to help out. I call on him and he pops to the front of the room. I put glasses on him as a costume. He turns to the audience – and freezes. There is no moving him. He’s my main character. And if my activity is to be successful, he has to move!

 The last thing I want to do is have a kid lose face in front of peers. So I have to think quickly of what to do.

 First I have to figure out, has the size of the audience scared him?

 I stand in front of him, blocking his view of the room. I whisper, “Do you want to do this part?” If he shakes her head, “No,” then I say, “Would you like to play another part instead?” If he says yes, I give him some smaller part to play. If he says, “No,” I ask, “Would you like to help me choose the person to take your place?” If he says, “Yes,” then I quickly say to the audience, that our volunteer “has decided to choose someone to take his place.” I then invite him to sit close by. This way, he can still feel part of the action and doesn’t have to do the long walk back to where his class is sitting.

 But what if the issue is that he has limited English?

 Again, with my back to the audience, I talk to him. I tell him not to worry – I’ll show him what to do. When we do speaking parts, I whisper the words to him and we repeat them together.

 And finally, what if the volunteer freezes but won’t relinquish the role?

 Let me tell you about this kindergartner . . .

 I was in a room with two classes of afternoon kindergartners together – about 50 kids. I had all the kids stand in a circle. The girl who volunteered to play a bully character, called Mean Jean, was to stomp around the circle wearing a crown and make mean faces at the kids. The kids were to act afraid of her. But when she got to the 12:00 position on the circle, she stopped, stood stock still and began to sob. I still don’t know what caused this – perhaps a classmate said something unkind to her? So I called her back. I asked if she’d like someone else to play Mean Jean. But she refused to relinquish the crown. She continued to cry. We were at an impasse. Then I asked if she’d like to choose someone to play the part with her. She nodded. So my two main characters had “twins” playing the roles and the tears disappeared.

 There is bound to be a time in your school visit experience when a volunteer freezes. But if you have a few strategies for thawing them, then the show can go on!

Signature Openings

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Even outgoing authors get butterflies before school assemblies or other presentations. A little anxiety is a good thing! But don’t let nervousness to derail the rest of your presentation.One way to avoid this is by having a signature opening.

 A signature opening means that you choose specific way to begin each presentation. Since the opening is something you are used to doing time and again, this can help calm your jitters. Here are some examples of types of signature openings

  • STORIES. Start by telling a story – not just “When I was a kid I loved to read,” but tell a specific story that demonstrates your passion for reading. People remember stories better than lists of rules or maxims.
  • IMAGES. You might click through a series of photos wordlessly before you begin, perhaps with some funny or unusual ones included. This shared experience bonds the audience and helps them anticipate your core program.
  • POLLS. Ask a question that all kids can answer such as “Where in the room are my kindergartners?” and then go on up through the grades. Or “How many of you love good stories?” Or “How many of you sometimes get stuck on what to write about?” Whether they raise their hands or not, the question itself requires kids to pause and think.
  • ACTIVITY. Engage the audience in an activity. If you’re comfortable getting kids to join in, have them join you for a song, a chant or just to clap along with something you perform.

 All of these techniques can help you capture the audience’s attention, but do what feels best to you. A signature opening can oil the gears of your presentation. Once you get rolling, it’s easier to stay rolling. Before long, the butterflies calm, and you’re into the core of your presentation, having a good time.

Scoping Out a School

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Before I visit a school, I explore the school’s website try to find out as much as I can such as

  • Location & directions (obviously)
  • School mascot
  • School colors
  • Upcoming special events
  • Total population
  • Minority population
  • Number of classes per grade level

 

This information gives me a feel for the approximate sizes of the audiences I’ll be seeing and how many handouts I’ll need for workshops. When I drop in a mention of the mascot or colors, this makes an instant connection with the kids. While I often get some of this information from my host, I just found out about a tool to use for demographics: SARC (the School Accountability Report Card).

 For SARC, public schools annually provide information about themselves to the community allowing the public to evaluate and compare schools for student achievement, environment, resources and demographics.

Taking into account your website search, your host’s information and SARC, these rich sources of data can help you prepare better for your school visit and help you make a stronger connection to your young audience as well as their teachers.

 To see examples forNew YorkandCalifornia, go to

New York 

https://reportcards.nysed.gov/

 California

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/sa/

 

Bundling Your Time

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Author Dori Butler wanted to be able to offer free mini-Skype visits to schools, but needed a way to manage requests:

 

“I like to be able to offer something [to schools] for free, in the interest of promoting literacy. But I’m doing it on MY terms. I’ve decided to set aside one day a month in which I will do four 15-minute Q & A sessions during my ‘lunch hour,’ and schools can sign up, first come, first served. When those slots are filled, they’re filled. And I will still require that everyone in those sessions have read or heard at least one of my books.”

 I loved that Dori took charge of her schedule and determined what would work best for her life of writing and appearances.

 One year when my calendar looked like Swiss cheese, pocked with non-writing obligations, I knew I needed to do something. So I crossed off the second week of every month and made it a ME week: no appointments, no food shopping, no writers meetings, no trips to the post office, no school visits. Just me, my desk and my computer.

 During times when I’m on tight deadlines, I’ve done a similar thing with school visits. I’ll pick a week out of the month in which I try to book the bulk of my visits. This is a little harder to do, especially when a juicy offer comes my way. But if I keep my ME week intact, it’s a little easier to cut the school visit week a little slack.

 At a business meeting a couple of weeks ago, I heard a consultant use the phrase, “Money Mondays.” What she meant was that she dedicated Mondays to doing financials related to her business. What a great way to tame must-do tasks!

 Our livelihoods depend on our being creative. And as much as we may love doing appearances and other things, we need to be smarter about how we use time so we can keep making terrific books. So, choose days of the week – or month – to bundle tasks and tame a time a little bit better. Trust me – it can reduce stress and lead to higher productivity.

Perfect Parking

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Not only did my host, Joyce Garcia of Rorimer Elementary, save a parking spot for me, she greeted me with an umbrella!

I circled the school three times before I found a spot. Time crunched, I schlepped a backpack, props, and equipment in the rain across a busy street and around massive puddles to the site of my school visit.

Parking. This may seem like a tiny detail in the scheme of things – but to start your day off frustration-free, this is one item you’ll want to have in your contract or letter of agreement.

My letter of agreement simply says: “If you can save a parking space for me, that would be terrific. (Most schools put out a cone with my name on it.)” Though it sounds like a suggestion, I do follow up about a week before my visit and remind them of this request. I think that the image of a bedraggled presenter has been enough to inspire action, and as a result, I always have a spot waiting for me. 

Even in great weather, it helps to be able to park close to the school.

 

4 Tips for Book Festival Presentations

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Book Festival Props

For outdoor presentations, blow up book pages to at least 16" x 20" and have kids help on stage

Book festivals offer big challenges to authors and illustrators when it comes to keeping the crowd focused and engaged in your presentation.

In school assemblies, you’re confident that the kids have a collective understanding of the school’s rules and are grouped by age. You can use a PowerPoint presentation to great effect.

But book festivals are open-air, multi-generational, noisy settings full of distractions and a fluid crowd. PowerPoint? Forget it!  A reading? It won’t engage enough of a crowd. Props? Better make them big so they can be seen. In short, you’ll have to revamp your presentation to suit the setting.

For my presentation at Feria del Libro in downtown Los Angeles, the stage was a small outdoor amphitheatre. Many of the festival-goers’ first language was Spanish.

 For color, I enlarged key pages of my book, Estela’s Swap, into poster-size images and laminated them. To engage the crowd, I invited kids to hold the posters on stage with the blank side toward the audience. Then I had the crowd sing a song that’s key to my story, “Cielto Lindo.” (While I don’t know how to speak Spanish, I can sing this song in Spanish!)

As I shared my book as a storyteller would (telling, not reading text), I tapped on kids to reveal the images for key points in the story. In the last scene, I had one child be the main character: she put on a bright orange Ballet Folklorico skirt and twirled.

To end, I had everyone – kids on stage and the audience – sing “Cielito Lindo” once more. This took about 15-20 minutes from start to finish, the perfect amount of time to keep a festival crowd’s attention.

 So here are 4 tips for successful Book Festival presentations:

1)     make your props big

2)     engage the audience in a group response

3)     use kids as volunteers

4)     keep the time limit short.

Click here for a list by state of Book Festivals and when they occur.

Focus Your Gig-Getting Energies in the New Year

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The number one question authors who want to do more school visits ask me is “How can I get more gigs?”

The simple answer is this: participate in activities where you are most likely to meet the people who are in a position to hire you. These people usually include librarians, teachers and teaching specialists, principals, curriculum coordinators, and parent group leaders. Also, booksellers often recommend authors to schools, so they are important contacts to have.

Look for opportunities to meet them where they gather – at workshops and conferences at the school district, county and state-wide levels. The best kind of involvement is doing presentations – either solo, duo or on a panel – where participants get a feel for your personality, presentation style and your books.

Concentrate on becoming known locally.  Even high-profile authors are feeling the funding pinch as many hosts are looking for local authors to save travel costs.

Schedule time to do an online search for professional associations. Find out when they meet and propose doing a workshop session. For example, I live in California, so here are some of the educational and literary associations, with their national counterparts, that I have been involved with (and most states will have similar groups):

Social gatherings are also great places to build relationships. For example, I attend some luncheons organized by teachers and librarians, especially those at which my friends are keynote speakers or who are receiving awards. These would include:

 Take time to find URLs for organizations, keep a database of conference dates and proposal deadlines, and strategize on where you can best focus your gig-finding opportunities in the coming year.

To get you started, here’s a link to reading associations in North America:

ASK ALEXIS: How Should I Shape My Workshop for Students?

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Image courtesy of digitalart/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My email inbox sees a steady stream of authors asking for advice on how to handle specific school visit situations. Since these concerns are the concerns of many, I thought I’d do a little “Dear Abby” here and post the question and my response in case this might help you, too.

 Dear Alexis,

I have a school visit set up for a local 6th grade language arts class. I thought I’d start with the publishing process and then talk a bit about where ideas come from. The teacher asked that I lead them into a Halloween creative writing assignment, so figured I might give them a couple different images to choose from. Just how much can I shove into 30-60 minutes? I was afraid if I talked about details as well, that it might be one subject too many. What do you think?”   — Happy-But-Anxious

 Dear Happy-But-Anxious,

First, congratulations on trying out new material in this one-class-dose at a familiar school. When you do this, it gives you a chance to get feedback from the teacher in a supportive environment and to tweak your presentation before you do it at another venue.  This builds skill and confidence.

 Now – about the workshop. A workshop is different from a school assembly in that it engages students in a hands-on experience to teach a specific strategy that students can apply to their work. In terms of pacing, think in chunks of time.  How many minutes will you devote to each segment of your session? Possible sequences (60-minutes, 45-minutes) might look like this:

 SEQUENCE for 60-minute session (ideal time)

10 minutes:    Introduction to you and your works

15 minutes     Activity Part 1: Model the strategy with the students

15 minutes:    Activity Part 2: Have students apply strategy independently

10 minutes:    Group Share

5 minutes:      Wrap-up & Next Steps

5 minutes:      Q & A

 

SEQUENCE for 45-minute session

5 minutes:      Introduction to you and your works

10 minutes     Activity Part 1: Model the strategy with the students

10 minutes:    Activity Part 2: Have students apply strategy independently

10 minutes:    Group Share

10 minutes:    Wrap-up and Q & A

 OPENING: The kids will want to know about you and your upcoming book, so it’s a good way to start and build rapport.

 ACTIVITY Part 1: Plan to focus on ONE thing and do it thoroughly. For example, rather than talk about where ideas come from, why not do a couple of different exercises that will have them actually generating ideas. Using photos as prompts is a great technique. You might call this exercise the “Idea Bank” (and in your case, it might be the “Halloween Idea Bank.”) They will make “deposits” into this bank that they can “withdraw” from when they need to.

 It always helps to model what you want the students to do, so, you might begin this segment by observing a photo together and have them generate ideas as a group.

 ACTIVITY Part 2: In the next step, give them another photo and have them generate ideas independently. You can show one photo on a big screen to the whole class, give a photo to small groups, or give out individual photos.

 GROUP SHARE: Invite students to share some ideas they’ve written down. (Make this voluntary.)

 WRAP-UP and NEXT STEPS: Quickly review the technique you demonstrated and extend this by sharing other specific strategies that you have used to generate ideas for your books or magazine articles.

 In addition to generating the Halloween Idea Bank, you might have students produce an opening sentence, a slice of dialogue, or a dramatic closing sentence to prime the pump for future writing. But by teaching them the bigger strategy of how to generate ideas, they will be better equipped to create stories later.

 Q & A: If you have time at the end, invite them to ask you about your work. This helps build a bond, writer-to-writer, and lets students know that their struggles are normal.

 Finally, by blending the “you” part (you as a writer and your book) and the “them” part (giving them a strategy they can apply to their writing) you’ll produce a satisfying session.

 Good luck!

 If you have a question, send an email to alexis@SchoolVisitExperts.com and put “Ask Alexis” in the subject line.

A Questioning Strategy: The Power of Wait-Time / Think-Time

If you conduct workshops with students, here’s a bit of research that can help you take your questioning techniques to a higher level.

Research by Mary Budd Rowe at Columbia University found that the average amount of time a teacher waits between asking a question and calling on a student to answer is one second. When wait-time is very short like this, students have little time to think about their response.  They tend to give short answers or are prone to say, “I don’t know.”  However, when “wait-time” or “think-time” (teachers waiting while students think) is extended to between three and five seconds, the student outcomes are remarkable:

  • The length of students’ responses increase.
  • The number of students’ “I don’t know” and no answer responses decreases.
  • The number of volunteered, appropriate answers by larger numbers of students greatly increases.

There are actually two crucial periods for wait-time/think-time. The first is after you pose a question. The second is after a student responds to your question. The first wait-time interval is important to allow students to consider a question and formulate a response. The second wait-time interval is crucial to encouraging that student to continue his/her response or for another student to extend the idea.

Suggestion: the next time you do a workshop, record it. When you play it back, document the questions you asked and how long you waited for a response from the students.  How’d you do on “wait-time”?  Do you need to give students more time to think?