Tag: WRAD

World Read-Aloud Day 2023

Eleven schools on WRAD23. The 2 in Texas were snowed out (stay safe and warm my friends) and one school was late, but by luck that coincided with a snowed out school, so all good. In addition to Winterkill I talked about Sylvia McNicoll’s What the Dog Knows and Adrian Lysenko’ s Five Stalks of Grain, and then showed the best nonfiction written about the Holodomor, Anne Applebalm’s Red Famine. 

Educator feedback:

“Thank you for reading aloud to my fifth and sixth graders today. It was fabulous. We now have a waiting list for Making Bombs for Hitler and for Winterkill.“

“Thank you so much for Zooming with us this morning. The excerpt you read was powerful and I anticipate Winterkill being checked out for the foreseeable future! Thank you for shining a light on this lesser known piece of history.”

“We enjoyed hearing you read from Winterkill and learning so much about your writing process.”

Thanks again for visiting with us! Every single one of your books that I have are checked out to students now! Success! 

Meeting with students in Georgia, Michigan and Montana …

It was a fun couple of days presenting to all of the 5th grade students from Riverside Elementary in Evans GA over the course of two sessions, and then catching up with two schools who had been scheduled for quick drop-ins for World Read-Aloud Day but who got ice-stormed out.

It was a small but mighty group in St. Louis MO made up of avid readers who asked GREAT questions. Their teacher emailed later to let me know that one of her students left the meeting completely in AWE and said “my year has been made!” Isn’t that the kind of feedback that melts an author’s heart?

During one of the sessions with Riverside, a student who is writing a big fat fantasy novel with a friend came up to the screen and we had a GREAT discussion about what to do when you write yourself into a corner. At St. Pat’s in MI, we had a great conversation about how those things that challenge us also become our gifts.

I miss seeing readers in person, so it’s great to meet with kids through the ether this way.

World Read-Aloud Day

It was a fun day celebrating World Read Aloud Day with seven schools and multiple classes within those schools. Many thanks to librarians and educators who scrambled amidst family emergencies, covid quarantines, and snow storms to still make the sessions happen. Mostly, I read the opening pages of my newest novel, Traitors Among Us, but Sara Lema of Allendale Michigan asked if I could read Chapter 16, The Blue Room, because she had been reading the book aloud to her class and that’s where they were! It was such fun for me to read in the middle of my book like that!Here’s a pic from Knowlton School in NJ and Weiner Elementary in AZ.