Skyping with Gordon Korman

Last Friday, we got to Skype with Gordon Korman. It was an awesome finale to our Lunch Bunch program with 5th graders at the Norwich Public Schools. We spent thirty minutes asking questions:

How did he become a writer?

Does he have kids?

Are they readers?

If he wasn't a writer, what does he think he'd be doing?

How he got his inspiration/ideas?

and dozens of others.

He was great - lots of fun, lots of information, and lots of laughter. The kids (plus the librarians) had a great time hanging out with him! We were lucky to have a technology grant that allowed us this amazing opportunity! 

Yesterday and Today: Bookish

I'm having a fun couple of book days - yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to go to Random House for a quick tour and lunch with some of the editors, which was fabulous. I'll share more on that over the weekend.

Plus, today Kim and I are Skyping with Gordon Korman!!!! Read more about why we're doing that at my librarian blog.

Trading Faces: a Middle School Book Club

This past fall, I partnered with the Kelly Middle School and Teacher's Memorial Middle School ASPIRE program. After school, twice a week, they bused a group of kids to the library and we read Trading Faces. It's a favorite tween book of mine, one that added to the middle school summer reading list when the school librarian and I redid the lists this past year.

We took a few chapters and discussed the book each week, most of the questions were based on Would You Rather, a style they enjoyed. It also got them talking about the book in ways that other discussion questions didn't. We had trivia contests, mazes, and word searches just for fun.

At the end of the program, we decided to create a book trailer. This was several weeks of work, and one day of filming. Our filming was cut short thanks to Hurricane Sandy. They were split up into teams: acting, camera work, script writing, and editing. The editing team didn't get to do their job because we filmed on the last day of the program. However, the rest of the film is all their work.