Welcome back to school, teachers and librarians!
It’s the most wonderful time of year, when pencils are being sharpened, decorations are hung up in classrooms, and events are being planned. To help you get ready for the school year, we’ve got our best teaching and school visit tips:
GET ORGANIZED
All the best author visits begin with great organization. Plan the best timing, prepare paperwork early, involve the whole school.
Example: Check for curriculum guides for the books and share them with your teachers a month or two before the author visit. Curriculum guides help breakdown a book’s subject matter and often include exercises and games teachers can use to help children get further into the book’s world. For example author Kelly Starling Lyons offers two downloadable guides for her picture book TEA CAKES FOR TOSH, as well as a recipe for the special cakes.
Get off to your best start this year with these tips:
- 10 Tips for Amazing Author Visits
- Salina Yoon’s Author Visit Success Tips
- 35-Point Checklist for a Great Author Visit
- 15 Steps to Make Your Next Author Visit the Best
BOOK WISELY
While you’re getting organized, consider who to bring to your school. What are you trying to teach your students? What lessons do you want authors to balance? How can you best inspire and empower your students?
Example: Authors and illustrators can speak on a number of topics. Some presentations are based around their books, others are about curriculum-based topics, and still others are designed to simply inspire. Before you choose a speaker, figure out what you want the presentation to achieve. Are you trying to convey a particular theme or message to your students? Do you want to supplement your teaching on a subject?
Look at your budget and your curriculum, then plan your year of author visits with these tips:
- How to Choose the Best Author or Illustrator for Your Event
- How to Make the Best Skype Visits
- How and Why to Build Diversity Into Your Speaker Program with Cynthia Leitich Smith
GET FUNDED
One of the biggest challenges to author visits is budgets. But there are many ways to make funding the last of your problems. Grants are available from numerous organizations, both governmental and private. PTAs can be recruited to host bake sales and more. Even students can participate in raising funds, helping them get involved in their own author visits.
Example: Pledge drives are a fun way for kids to feel like they’re contributing. And they can be organized for just about anything. To give kids more ownership of an author event, you could do a pledge drive for the number of books they read in a month, over the summer or in a school year, with the funds raised used for author events the following year. The kids could even help choose the authors.
Start raising funds with these tips:
- 35 Ways to Fund Author Visits
- 5 Fundraising Ideas Kids Can Do
- 8 Tips to Write Winning Grant Applications
WHY WE DO IT
Author visits provide help to teachers and students, deepening lessons and empowering kids. Of course, they lead to other wonderful things too.
Example: Teacher Ms McCarthy says, “I have a student who picked up on David Elliott’s comment, ‘Sometimes writing is harder for people who love writing…they want to say it perfectly!’ My student realized this was HIS difficulty also. My student could not clearly communicate his frustrations—he just crumpled his paper and threw it in the trash. I thought my student didn’t care for writing at all—turns out he just needed another author to express this for him!”
Check out some of the best reasons to bring authors to your school:
- 5 Ways Author Visits Benefit You by author Carmen Oliver
- 13 Sweet and Hilarious Questions Kids Asked During Author Visits
- 10 Amazing Results of Author Visits
Start your author visit planning by looking through our speakers.