Author Visit--Francesca Zappia

This week I hosted author Francesca Zappia (of Made You Up) at my school to meet with my Library Media students.  I'll review Made You Up tomorrow here on the blog, but I wanted to give you a peek at our visit! 

I made a short video about the day, which you can check out here:

Made You Up has a Magic 8 Ball that appears sporadically throughout the book, so my students all wore T-shirts with 8 Ball phrases on them.

Notice that Francesca and a few students are wearing Converse?  Totally planned.

Francesca had a relaxed visit with the students, offering plenty of time for Q&A (which was perfect because they had questions after reading the book!).

We also had lunch together and played a game of "Real or Made Up."  Get it?  Made Up, Made You Up?

 

A huge thanks to Francesca for the visit!  She got RAVE reviews from the students!

Starting our Ashfall Decorations

This December I'm having Mike Mullin, author of the Ashfall trilogy, visit our library.  Needless to say, I am so stoked.  I can't wait to watch my students, who have MUCH to say about Ashfall, interact with him.  I told Mike that we would probably have some things in our library that he hasn't seen before (because I LOVE to think-outside-the-box when it comes to our library decorations), and he reminded me that he's been in hundreds of libraries and seen A LOT.  So now it's my mission to show Mike inspired, creative projects related completely to Ashfall.

About a month ago, my students did a writing activity for me, and one student wrote "We are at the mercy of Mother Earth" in response to my prompt.  I stopped when I read that statement, because I think that is one of the themes of Ashfall.  So I decided we had to have that quote displayed somewhere for Mike's visit.  Here's how I did that:

We have this Jackson Pollock print hanging in the library...it's been there forever (yeah, it's upside-down in the photo).  It blended into the cream walls so much that the students never really gave it a second glance.  But the chaos of the art was perfect for the unexpected, craziness of Mother Nature.  So I decided to use this as our background.

My assistant and I cut out the letters from the quote and attached it to the artwork with this tacky spray.  Don't worry--the artwork is within the frame and will be reusable once this project is over!

 After the words were glued to the art, I spray painted the rest of the frame with gray.  I chose gray because the majority of the book Ashfall is dull and dismal.

We then peeled off the letters and rubbed off any leftover glue.  And now we have our quote!  This will hang in a corner of the library with all the other Ashfall decor.  

What do you think?