TO SKYPE OR NOT TO SKYPE

I’ve been doing author visits for more than twenty years.  I love having an opportunity to meet my readers in person.  With school budgets being cut left and right, sometimes schools can’t afford to bring in an author, so they turn to the next best thing, SKYPE.   I recently had the pleasure of SKYPING with some 4^th graders in Shelton CT.  Their wonderful teacher, Mrs. Pollack got in touch with me and together we planned the visit. The format would be Q&A, with the discussion being generated by the questions the kids wanted to ask.  Mrs. Pollack’s class was SO well prepared they made my job easy!  They had read many of my books together in class, and they came up with some really interesting questions. We had some technical glitches, due to weather  in New York, but in the end we had a terrific time chatting about books, and pies and just getting to know each other.  BTW, my SKYPE visit might never have taken place if it hadn’t been for a certain boy with a mohawk in Mrs/ Pollack’s class who loved pie so much he just had to read PIE!

Kids always ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?”  It’s hard to explain sometimes.  I try to keep my eyes and ears and heart open to anything that might come along and suggest an idea for a story to me.  This week I discovered a wonderful pothole in my street.  Wonderful and pothole do not normally go together in the same sentence.  But see for yourself.  This is the same pothole before and after a rainstorm.  Whether or not I end up using this image in a story some day I’m still glad I saw it.  The world is a wonderful place, don’t you think?

Have you read Peter Reynold’s wonderful book, THE DOT?  Well, Terry Shay, an amazing educator in Iowa and founder of International Dot Day, has started a new site called “Celebri-DOTS”.  He’s asked some authors, illustrators, and other celebrities to create dots and sign them so they can be placed on the site: http://celebridots.blogspot.com.

Check out my contribution!  You know me, any excuse to bake a pie…

International Dot Day is a celebration of creativity around the globe that grows bigger every year. Over 17,000 students and 1,000 adults created their own dots on or around International Dot Day http://www.fablevisionlearning.com/dotday last year.

So join the fun and get your dot on!!!!! –SW