A few weeks ago our local independent bookshop, Avid Bookshop, emailed me with an opportunity. Sarah Weeks, author of Pie and many other great books, was coming to Athens, and they wanted her to visit our school. Hooray! I try to jump at every author visit I can get. For the visit, I needed to presale some books, which I always do, but this time we wanted to try something new and crazy. I’ve always wanted to do a school wide read, but I have never gotten the idea off the ground. I saw this as a perfect chance to try it with a smaller number of students rather than the whole school. This author visit focused on upper grades. Our 5th graders would be gone to Skidaway on a field trip, so 3rd and 4th grade would be the classes coming to the visit. Rather than asking every student to buy a copy of the book, I decided to try a GoFundMe campaign to raise enough money to give every 3rd and 4th grader a copy of Pie as well as buy a few copies of Honey to give away to a few students.
In just under 1 month, 28 donors funded our project. These donors included community members, grandparents, families, and friends from around the country. Thank you to each one of these donors who made this crazy idea a reality.
When Sarah Weeks came to visit our school, I got to make the exciting announcement and tell them about the 28 people who took time to donate money to the project. I also told them that the deal from me is that I want each one of them to read Pie. I want them to share it with families and spend time talking about it. I also want them to make things together like family recipes or even pies. My hope is that they will document this over the summer on a Padlet.
Sarah Weeks was phenomenal in her visit and I highly recommend her to any schools looking for a great author visit. She built so many frequently asked questions into her talk such as “What was your first book?”, “What is your current book?”, “Do you get writer’s block?”, etc. Each question was answered with slides filled with great photographs, personal stories, and lots of funny moments. The students laughed so much at Sarah’s stories about boys painting their fingernails, kids doing puppets shows through the shirts, and dogs joining.
She talked about a story arc and had students moving their hands to show the flow of a story through beginning, middle, and end. She also told them a story about a cowboy on a horse in the airport and paused along the way to point out what part of the arc she was in during the story. What a great connection to what they are learning in writing class!
She showed them the many revisions that her work goes through and how important it is to listen to her editor. She connected this to all of the notes that students see on their writing papers and stressed how they needed to listen to their teachers’ comments because it helps make the writing better.
Sarah has so many books that she couldn’t talk about them all. She started with books like the Oggie Cooder books and how he charves cheese into the shapes of states.
We had one student who knew every state she showed a picture of!
Sarah’s two new books are Glamourpuss and Honey. She treated the students to a full reading of Glamourpuss and the high-energy students were mesmerized. I loved how she showed Honey to the students. She showed several slides with single words that helped students know some things the books was about, but then she showed students several characters from the book along with text from the book that gave the students a taste of the character.
Then, she showed the students how she had to do research to learn about how nail polish is made. This story connected with a great story about how some girls in a library were painting their nails and several boys were very curious. The librarian at the school hosted a nails at noon session in the library and it was attended by mostly boys who painted their nails and posed for some fierce pictures.
I couldn’t believe how much Sarah packed into an hour long presentation. There was even time for Q & A. She was engaging, funny, and a pro at keeping the student’s attention. I loved getting to hang out with Sarah Weeks even for a brief time. She is a fun person and a talented writer.
Thank you Avid Bookshop and Scholastic for bringing her to our school. Thank you to all of the donors who got Pie into the hands of all of our kids.
As I went to car riders today, I saw several students in the hallway already reading their books while they waited. That’s what it’s all about!
It was a really fun day!
Expect the Miraculous 