I really love visiting schools.  So much of my job is spent alone in my house making art (which I also love) that it’s refreshing to get out and talk with the young readers of my books.

When I visit a school, I often do art projects with the kids.  I have collage projects for making ninjas, Monkey Ono, and ants at a picnic.  Sometimes we draw Monkey Ono or learn about making different facial expressions. Once a school invited me to talk about personal narratives and I taught the children to make collage self-portraits.  No matter the subject – there’s an art project for that!

I also love to work games into my presentations.  Let’s face it, listening to anyone talk for 45 minutes can get tiresome.  I put a lot of audience participation in each presentation, and I try to work in games that get some students up on stage.  For this presentation, I was talking about developing characters.  We looked at the differences in many famous character.  This game is called Lucy or Charlie Brown.  I read a line of dialog and the students had to guess if it was Lucy or Charlie Brown based solely on the words and attitude of the line.

To learn more about my school visits, visit the Author Visit tab above, or send me an email at julie_c@rocketmail.com.