An Author Afternoon Tea

As a teacher librarian, Twitter is an invaluable way to keep up to date with all things ‘books’, but for me the real value and joy is being able to connect with authors and in turn connect our students too. Connecting through Twitter with the four fabulous authors in this blog post has enriched both our reading and library program in ways I had never imagined…

I was excited to read on Twitter that The Little Bookroom in Carlton was hosting an Author Afternoon Tea on March 3rd and quickly sent my RSVP so I would have an opportunity to catch up with Jacqueline Harvey, Adrian Beck, Felice Arena and Tristan Bancks together in the one place.

It was a treat to be at The Little Bookroom to hear these fabulous authors talk about their books, answer questions and chat about bookish things…

When four authors get together you can’t miss the opportunity to take…

an Author Selfie…

Did you know…

Here is some of the latest news about each of the authors from the Author Afternoon Tea and a reminder of the ways we have been lucky to connect with them.

Jacqueline Harvey has two new books out for her popular Alice Miranda and Clementine Rose series. Click on the book covers to read some of each story…

Jacqueline has recorded the first five Alice Miranda books as audio books for Audible. Now Jacqueline can read to you! (Check with your parents if you want to subscribe)

Who would have thought Jacqueline would have written so many books including two successful book series since she visited our library on her book tour for her first Alice Miranda book in March 2012!

We know Adrian Beck is co-author of the Kick it to Nick series with Shane Crawford, but Adrian is also about to launch a new book in May for the Stuff Happens series and his character Dale also shares his red coloured hair! We can’t wait for this book!

Adrian is now the executive producer of Kids WB and it’s great to see lots of children’s authors talking about their books on the show. (Stay tuned because Jacqueline and Tristan will be on the show in the next few weeks).

We had lots of fun with Adrian last year when he came up with the brilliant idea of the Yeo-low Medal reading competition for our school and wore his ‘best’ suit to present the Yeo-Low Medal to our winners. We’re going to read for the Yeo-Low Medal again this year Adrian!

Felice Arena and his Sporty Kids series have been a big hit at our school. The Year Ones had fun tweeting about the books with Felice last year as we read them and Felice recently made a surprise visit to see these students this year. We are looking forward to his Handball and Basketball books coming out very soon! Felice told us he has recently finished writing an historical fiction novel for older readers that will be coming out in February 2017. 

Last year our school was incredibly lucky to have authors Felice Arena, Adrian Beck and Michael Wagner perform their Kicking Goals for Readers  AFL footy show for us. It was such a fun way to celebrate books and footy!

Tristan Bancks is the author of the very funny My Life series that lots of our students enjoy reading. His newest book My Life and Other Exploding Chickens is out now and I laughed out loud reading about the Ninja Librarians (I might have sorted out my Book Week costume early this year)!

Tristan loves having his readers contribute to his stories and if you want to add an idea for his next story about nits (yes nits!!) for his next book you can do so HERE.

I was lucky to meet Tristan and see his presentation at the 2015 Children’s Book Festival . Last year At their Sleepover, the Year Fours squirmed a lot while listening to ‘Scab’ from Tristan’s book My Life and Other Stuff I Made Up that I read for their Bedtime Story in the LRC.

#ReadingIsFun

 

Year Two’s surprise visit from Felice Arena

Last year (when they were in Year One), the Year Two classes had lots of fun tweeting and connecting with author Felice Arena as we read the books in his Sporty Kids series. So this year Felice and I had a surprise for them! This morning the three Year Two classes came to the library with their teachers thinking I wanted to have a serious talk to them. You can imagine their surprise (and I think some of them were a bit shocked) when Felice appeared! 

What a wonderful hour the Year Twos spent with Felice! They had fun silently cheering on their very own Specky Magee in slow motion. Everyone listened closely as Felice read his Swimming book from Sporty Kids and some students even knew the story off by heart! Felice told them about some of the other books he has written including Specky Magee, Andy Roid, Farticus Maximus (lots of laughs talking about this), Stick Dudes and his picture book Sally and Dave, A Slug Story (which translates differently in Chinese!). He also revealed that he had been an Art teacher and actor before becoming an author. Felice explained that listening to music as he wrote his latest book for older readers helped him think about the setting, plot and mood for his story. He played some of this music and asked students what they were thinking as they heard the music. I think we might have some budding writers in Year Two because their responses were very closely connected to Felice’s new book!

Thank you Felice for coming to visit the Year Twos, and for bringing your books to life and making reading fun!

Here are some photos from Felice’s surprise visit…

Kicking Goals For Readers

Now the first official performance of Kicking Goals For Readers has been performed I can publish this blog post…

It was a HUGE day for reading and football on Friday, June 19th at St Martin’s!

Excitement was bubbling to Grand Final fever pitch as our 21 classes gathered in our hall to watch the highly anticipated stage performance of Kicking Goals For Readers by footy authors Felice Arena, Michael Wagner and Adrian Beck. These popular authors whose footy books cover from P-6 are combining their many talents ‘to take the action from the page to the stage’…  

Wearing our footy colours and passionately singing along to footy team songs everyone was in the footy spirit. The hall erupted with laughter as Felice Arena emerged doing his ‘Umpire Dance’ and some rather fancy footy tricks! The scene was set for a combination of Aussie Rules football, music, multimedia, books and lots of fun.

There were so many parts of the show to enjoy, including each author performing a unique version of his footy team song. Who would have thought “Good Old Collingwood” could be sung as a folk song and be surprisingly soothing? We laughed at the video of the authors taking on 1GC’s Egg Handball Challenge and an unlucky author who ended up with egg on his face. Felice helped our very own ‘Specky Magee’ in Year 6 show us how to take a slow motion Specky while we all had fun barracking silently in slow motion. Imagine a capacity crowd barracking like this on Grand Final day at the MCG!

We also enjoyed listening to each author speak about his books and writing journey and the positive messages each imparted about writing, following your dreams and having a passion for what you do. It was also interesting to hear about the different paths that led each of them to becoming authors and great to see them collaborating with their show.

One thing for certain is that we will never look at umpires in the same way again after watching the dance moves in the hilarious “Umpire Funk” led by Felice with our very own Mr O and Mr Z. We might have to try out some “Umpire Funk” on our Footy Day in September with Mr O leading the way with his groovy freestyle dance moves. At the end of the show we noticed that the windows in our hall had actually steamed up from all of the fun and excitement!  

After using lots of energy performing, our authors happily greeted long lines of eager fans and generously spent the afternoon in our library signing books and chatting with each child. It was a delight to see the looks on children’s faces as they met Felice, Michael and Adrian. There was such a wonderful buzz at the end of the day as students rushed to tell their parents about the performance and show them their signed books! Our authors had definitely achieved their goal of Kicking Goals For Readers and ‘taking the action from the page to the stage’…  

Enjoy watching some of the highlights of Kicking Goals For Readers 

I use Twitter professionally to connect with other educators and love the opportunity it also provides to interact with authors like Felice, Michael and Adrian. When Felice asked if they could trial their show with our school before their first official performance I was surprised, excited (and a tad nervous), but in the end I was SO glad I said “Yes”!  It provided me with a wonderful opportunity to do one of the most important jobs teacher librarians do…bringing children, books and authors together.

Thank you Felice, Michael and Adrian for an amazing experience for our school and a fabulous and fun celebration of books, reading and footy!  

Footy, footy, footy!
Read, read, read!

Twitter with Year Ones and Felice Arena

Felice Arena is a popular author in our library! Felice has a range of fans across the grades for his series books including Specky Magee, Farticus Maximus, Stick Dudes and Andy Roid. You can find Felice’s website HERE.

Felice has just released a new series called Sporty Kids that is perfect for early readers. The first sports are Swimming and Footy with more sports to follow. The books are a perfect length with short chapters and fun illustrations by Tom Jellett.

Miss Y thought the Year Ones would really enjoy the Sporty Kids books and she wasn’t wrong!  We read the Swimming book and had lots of fun talking about belly- whackers (and demonstrating them!).  Lots of students have had swimming lessons and knew the activities that Emma and her friends were doing. They liked that some of the characters shared names with children in their classes. They loved the way Emma used her imagination to help her with her swimming and had lots of fun guessing which sea creatures she would pretend to be and were very accurate with their guesses! Some classes even cheered Emma on as she tried her last dive.

A big part of the fun was when Miss Y took photos of each class pretending to be one of the sea creatures and tweeted the photo and our comment to Felice. It was so exciting to have Felice send a tweet back to each class!

You can read them here…

Tweeting with Felice was a fabulous way to connect the students directly and immediately with the author of the book they were reading and to “take the book off the page”! They were thrilled to read Felice’s replies.  It was tricky fitting everything into our 45 minute lesson (and Miss Y had a few typos while trying to speed type on her phone) but it was well worth the effort.

Thank you Felice, for helping Miss Y make reading fun in our LRC.  We can’t wait to read your Sporty Kids Footy book next…

From Miss Y and the Year Ones – 1C, 1GC and 1MB 🙂