Archive for the ‘school visits’ Category

At long last, the weather and school schedule were both good on the same day. I led groups of fifth graders at McLeod Elementary School on a field shoot. We were in search of living things in the schoolyard. Each student carried a digital camera. Each group chose a different section of the schoolyard to shoot in. I am sharing some of their photographs here. As we went about our work, the students and I generated lots of questions. “What is it? Why is it that color? Will I find these where I live? Will it bite?”

My work on this project is funded by the Ask for More Arts collaborative of Parents for Public Schools of Jackson. McLeod is an Ask for More Arts school and participates in the JumpstArt program, which brings artists of all kinds into elementary classrooms across the city for arts instruction integrated with traditional academic subjects.

Day 1

6-10:30 a.m. Rise, walk dog with Richard, prepare boys’ lunch, walk dog with friend, Pilates.

10:40 -11:05 a.m. Conversation with filmmaker (who happens also to be a friend) about script for book trailer. Glad to be working with a professional. Moving images and audio are way out of my area of expertise. Grateful for grant from state and local arts agencies that made it possible for me to hire professional filmmakers for my book trailer.

11:10-11:30 a.m. Shower.

11:35-11:55 a.m. Start blog post for later this week, featuring an interview with video.

12:00-1:00 p.m. Re-heat lunch and eat with Richard. Sneak downstairs to computer for a minute to email some links and a still photograph to filmmaker.

1:05-2:30 p.m. Rest. A little longer than usual because I was savoring the end of a fun novel, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. (The cover art bothers me a tad; Alice Blackwell marries in a cotton two piece that her mother-in-law dismisses as a pioneer girl outfit; the dress on the cover is NOT that.)

2:35- 3:02 p.m. Put finishing touches on blog post.

3:02 p.m. Email from magazine editor. Needs phone conference on piece slated for August. Reply that I am free until 3:50 p.m. when I must collect two younger boys from school.

3:05 – 3:35 p.m. Tie three split chicken breasts around two onions and two sprigs of fresh rosemary. Rub with olive oil, more rosemary, and some thyme. Editor calls. Use cordless phones and headset to discuss magazine piece. Concerns must be answered. A potential re-write angle is discussed. Editor promises to email the potential new angle. I promise to think — and figure out a direction by noon next day.

3:45 p.m. Start oven preheating. Bundle up for unseasonably cold weather. Gloves, hat, scarf, fleece. Go to door to let my oldest son in. “Is it that cold inside?” he asks. G’s always a bright spot in my day.

3:50 p.m. Pick up younger boys at school. Conference with teacher about blazers that need to be purchased with booster club monies. I am the keeper of the booster club monies, but I forgot to bring the total. Her computer is down and the Blazer company’s phone line is busy. We agree to talk next day. I promise her we have enough money for 5 blazers — even though I don’t know how much money we have, nor the exact cost.

4:30 p.m. Home. Put chicken in oven. Peel white and sweet potatoes. Add to roasting pan.

4:50 p.m. Print potential re-write angle.  Call critique partner to see if she can brainstorm later. Make 6:30 p.m. appointment. Sit in living room chair to consider rewrite.

5 p.m. Place call to editor — even though it is an hour after close on the East Coast. Editor at desk. (They work long hours.) Convey my belief that rewrite angle is bad idea, but promise to try something later.

5:10 p.m Wash and trim asparagus for steaming. Cut the chicken while Richard makes gravy.

5:30 p.m Sit down to roast chicken, potatoes, steamed asparagus, and gravy.

5:55 p.m. Walk dog with Richard. One boy does dishes, one boy feeds dog and takes out trash, and one waters the plants.

6:30 p.m. Home just in time for call with critique partner. Not really much brainstorming. I’ve decided I can’t rewrite from proposed angle. Back and forth. Discuss a small bit of school business.

6:45 p.m. Sit at computer. Bring up final, edited version of magazine piece. Pull out a few research sources, search internet for more information. Become more firm in my position that proposed angle won’t work. Write email to editor. At a loss for how to proceed. Suggest scrapping article or pulling byline. Am out of ideas. Give morning schedule so editor can reach me.

7:45 p.m. Read to D from Shadow’s Edge.

8:30 p.m. Seek to connect with N about science fair project that is causing problems. He’s in no mood for it.

8:30 – 9:30 p.m. A little kitchen tidying, a little web browsing. Eat popcorn with nice, warm cup of tea. 10 p.m. Asleep.

Day 2 (Today)

Early routine same. (substitute recumbent bike and treadmill for water aerobics because pool heater is not working and water is COLD.)

6:54 a.m. Editor replies via email. Editor ready to throw in towel, too, but only temporarily. Will sub another article for August. Will work through issues somehow.

9:30 a.m.  Take model airplane to school so youngest son will have it for Science Olympiad after school.

9:45 a.m. Re-heat black-eyed peas prepared two days ago for today’s church lunch for the food pantry customers.

10 a.m. Shower.

10:50 a.m. Hand off black-eyed peas to friend who is attending lunch.

11 a.m. Prepare lesson on transferring digital photographs for 5th graders. Review script and time line from filmmakers. Field email query about macro lens. 12 noon. Eat reheated soup for lunch.

12:10 -3:45 p.m. Teach 5th graders. Computer glitch makes it impossible to transfer photos so we take more photographs. Meet with teacher after school.

3:50-4:10 p.m. Transfer students’ digital photographs to my computer.

4:15 p.m. Head to Post Office to send check for Blazers via Priority Mail.

4:50 – 5:20 p.m. Home. Brief chat with Richard about the day.

5:20 p.m. Take G to piano lesson. While he’s having lesson, run to library to get book.

6:10 p.m. Home to Richard’s tasty pasta salad (quinoa salad for me because I eat gluten-free).

Walk dog. Kids do chores. Blog. Review script with Richard. Read to Douglas. Sleep.

Our two copies of Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature arrived today. The books are beautiful! The colors are bright, the pages are shiny, and the shape is a golden rectangle. After getting some positive feedback on using video on the blog, I decided that this would be a good day to use it again. You can watch the brief video below and then read on for more information.

From my early days of writing for children, I have always read what I was working on to kids. At first, it was my own. Then, I moved on to sharing with kids at my kids’ school. In addition to reading my stories and poems, I read all kinds of books to small groups and entire classrooms. I could tell from the kids’ reactions what was working and what was not. I learned, too, that kids are not willing to sit still for version after version of the same story. I learned to get my stories into pretty good shape before I shared and to read once and move on.

One of the spreads in Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator is in the book because of questions I got from kids when I went to schools with my Highlights article about wolfsnails. Kids always asked if wolfsnails eat worms. I created a scene in which a wolfsnail encounters a worm (and does not eat it) so that I could answer the question in the text.

With Growing Patterns I pushed my luck with a few of the young readers, asking them to read it aloud to me. I know they felt a little nervous, but I kept my mouth shut and tried not to be too obvious about the notes I was taking. I was watching for places where they stumbled over my awkward constructions or where they needed more clarification. Two second graders wrote out a page of questions for me. Many of the questions were about how I took the photographs or got interested in the pattern. But they also pointed out their favorite photographs and patterns. I am very excited about going back to their school this week and showing these now third graders the final product.

Thank you, everybody!

This may be the last of the Tuscon photographs. Richard converted it to black and white. We have been updating and upgrading around here. You may notice some new things on the blog. To the left I have added more links to the blogs of fellow Southern Breezers. If I have left someone out, please comment to let me know. I am still building my list. Richard converted the Tuscon sunrise photograph to a wallpaper file. It is very nice!

I now work with a webcam attached to my monitor. It’s a little disconcerting to have this eyeball like thing staring back at me. I am practicing using Skype (which I hope to use to do virtual school visits soon) by calling Richard’s parents in England. Unfortunately, right now the news from there involves major surgery and lots of anxiety about its outcome. But it is nice to be able to see Silvana and Tony while we talk. They enjoy seeing their grandsons.

We got some nice quiet rain today and we have been having a nice day in our basement lair. Two of the boys are helping blog/website maintenance. Richard and D are playing ping-pong. It is a good start to a much-needed week off.

Today at McLeod we pulled the Kodak Easyshare M380 cameras out of their boxes and the students started taking photographs. The fifth graders started by taking pictures of each other. We had the class divided into six groups of four students each. I led three groups at a time with hands-on camera work and my two teacher partners, Mrs. Courson and Mrs. McBride, took turns leading the other three groups on a walk around the school grounds.

They were looking for specific examples of plant and animal life. The next time we go out the groups will be taking photographs of some of the living things in the McLeod Schoolyard so we can make a Schoolyard Field Guide. This is a JumpstArt arts integration project sponsored by Ask For More Arts, a partnership spearheaded by Parents for Public Schools of Greater Jackson.

The students did a pre-assessment which asked them to list the producers, consumers, and decomposers in the schoolyard. We will ask them for this information in a different way once we have completed our field guide. We are confident that they’ll engage these concepts more deeply as they produce a schoolyard field guide. Some of the living things on their lists from today’s brief walk were: butterflies, oak trees, moles (when I asked about the mole, they said they had seen evidence of moles in disturbed dirt), blueberry bushes, mushrooms, and poison ivy. We are going to need some good field guides of trees, plants, insects, reptiles, and birds. If anyone has any books they’d like to let us borrow or have for our project, please get in touch with me.

Hester Bass did a fabulous job at Power APAC today introducing visual arts students from grades 6 through 12 to the creative process of writing picture books. In the above photograph, she is reading from The Secret World of Walter Anderson, which was recently named one of Kirkus’ Best Children’s Books of 2009. Because she worked so closely with her fantastic illustrator, E.B. Lewis, she also shared much about the process of illustrating a picture book with watercolor paintings. Power APAC students had studied Walter Anderson’s work prior to Hester’s visit and had also done some historical research, but her tale sparked a renewed interest in his work and life.

Hester’s publicist at Candlewick worked with Mississippi Public Broadcasting to set up an interview for an online program titled Don’t Lecture Me. The show will go online in about two weeks.

Students provided a back drop for a mini-set on the Power APAC stage. It was a pleasure for me to see Hester in action. I always learn from my colleagues in this business. Hester’s stage presence was obvious from the moment she stepped in front of the students. She sang and she read. She encouraged the students to read, to write (and sketch) in journals, and to set goals. She got questions about publishing and about Walter Anderson. One student wanted to know about the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs.

My friend, Hester Bass, wrote an extraordinary picture book biography of Walter Anderson, a great American artist who did most of his work in Mississippi. Publisher’s Weekly called the The Secret World of Walter Anderson, published by Candlewick Press, “a powerful tribute to the lengths artists will go for their passions.” A starred reivew in Kirkus said it was “a gorgeous chronicle of a versatile southern American artist.”

The story is illustrated by E.B. Lewis; an additional 8-page author’s note gives more details about Anderson’s life and includes photographs of his paintings, linocuts, and decorations on pottery. I interviewed Hester last month at the Writing and Illustrating for Kids conference put on by the Southern Breeze regional chapter of SCBWI. Click on the play button below to hear why Hester wrote the book and to hear her read an excerpt.

Hester is heading to Mississippi next week for a brief tour that will include stops in Jackson and Vicksburg. She’ll be signing books at the Mississippi Museum of Art on Saturday, Nov. 14; Lemuria bookstore on Sunday, Nov. 15; and she’ll be doing a school visit at my kids’ school, Power Academic and Performing Arts Complex, on Tuesday, Nov. 17. You can catch her in Vicksburg at Lorelei Books on Monday, November 16. Click on Hester’s website or on the venue’s links to check times for the public events. Hester, who once delivered singing telegrams, is an engaging performer and her book would make an excellent gift for the kids, teachers, and art lovers on your Christmas list.

Please let me know if you like the video interview. I am experimenting with using more video on my blog. I’d like to use more video to show my work process with photography. Let me know what you think.

I learned yesterday that my application to join the Mississippi Arts Commission‘s artist roster as a visual artist was approved. Last year at this time I joined the roster as a literary artist, but because I offer both writing and photography presentations to schools, I decided to apply as a photographer also. This way schools and organizations may use MAC grant funds to pay for up to half of my presentation fee. I had to pass muster with a professional panel on each art form individually. I felt and still feel that a picture book creator should be allowed to submit words and pictures together. I believe that mastery in my art form includes mastery of the way images and text work together.

That being said, I am now on the roster in both categories so schools and organizations will have access to grant funds whether they choose to hire me to present and teach on writing or photography. The next application date for mini-grants this year is Nov. 2, 2009. I appreciate the work the commission and its staff do to support artists and arts instruction in schools.

This photo of river otters appeared in the Look at the … feature of the July issue of Highlights High Five magazine. You can find this feature inside the back cover of the magazine. Richard and I have three more images in upcoming issues.

One of my goals this year is to learn more about photoshop. I followed a tutorial to create art images from three photographs I took last year. I like the bottom one best. What do you think?

Here is one of the busier pages of the Growing Patterns manuscript. My editor and I are trying to solve a problem. As part of my school and library visit program, I share the close-to-final mansucript for Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator. I want students to see that the process of writing (and re-writing) keeps on going right up until the book is printed. I took a picture of this page to let you see our notes back and forth in the Word tracking feature. In this latest back-and-forth between Andy and me, he’s asked for some more photographs. In the book, Richard and I use close-up macro photographs and Andy wants to include some photographs that show the entire objects, too. I’ve sent him some options.

We’re also trying to make sure that readers understand that a particular set of photographs is actually three copies of the same image. We’ve done some digital manipulation to highlight a pattern. Some people who have looked at the dummy have thought the three images were of three different examples of the same object. I think we’re getting close to a solution. One of the things that is helping during this revision is that I am still doing school and library visits with Wolfsnail so I have been reading drafts of Growing Patterns to the kids I meet. I get such good feedback by watching their faces and hearing their questions.

Richard and I got a nice (and unexpected) mention today on a blog I read regularly, I.N.K.: Interesting Nonfiction for Kids. Here is one section of an exchange between author Loreen Leedy and her contact at Holiday House, discussing today’s market for nonfiction in children’s publishing.

“What innovations in presenting nonfiction have been significant in recent years? (Photos vs. illustration, length of book, graphic design, etc.)
Technical advances have been changing nonfiction for some time, particularly in the area of illustration and graphic design. From pop-ups like Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart to new manufacturing techniques that allow the use of “scanimation” in Gallop! by Rufus Butler Seder to ever more amazing techniques in taking photographs and reproducing them such as in Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator by Sarah and Richard Campbell, nonfiction is constantly becoming more sophisticated, more innovative, and more novel.”

Wolfsnail Update: Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator is showing up on all kinds of summer reading lists — including the Chicago Public Schools‘  list for grades 3-4. Wolfsnail was also featured on a podcast produced by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. Here’s this year’s podcast archive. Click to hear Episode 48. The Wolfsnail booktalk begins about 7 minutes in and lasts about 2 minutes.

Gardening Update: I picked my first cucumber today! I absolutely love cucumbers. It was delicious and there are at least a dozen more on the vine. I didn’t have time to take a photo. I gobbled the cucumber up in a lunchtime salad. I also picked three zucchini and a handful of beans and snap peas. It is so very hot out there (97 degrees today) that I don’t know how the plants can stand it. They’re drinking lots of water. I hope the tomatoes ripen soon.

A lovely package came in the mail from Great Salt Bay Community School. The students in first and second grades we met during our school visit wrote us letters, drew pictures, made cards, and made flip books. It made us so happy to get them. This drawing is by Ellie and she wrote: “Thank you for reading Wolf Snail. What made you want to be an author?” Well, Ellie, the first answer is that  I love, love, love to read and sometimes when I am reading, I think ‘Wow! I want to be able to do that.” The second answer is that I like to write. I do all kinds of writing — letters, like the one you wrote to me; newspaper articles; and journals. The third answer is because I love to make things. Writing and illustrating books gives me the chance to make a wonderful thing that people can read.

The flip books are wonderfully colorful! Here’s one page, made by JoJo. As you can see, it asks “What protects a wolfsnail? Flip up the flap and you’ll see: “Its shell.” The questions in these books ran the gamut — including “Where do wolfsnails live? what do wolfsnails eat? What part of the wolfsnail comes out first? How do wolfsnails walk? How many feet does the wolfsnail have? Does it eat worms? How does a wolfsnail find its food?”

I love seeing what teachers and students do with Wolfsnail — to extend the learning process. Please keep sending us letters, cards and books. We love them!

My new website went live yesterday. Let me know what you think.

Gardening Update
We harvested our spinach yesterday and made a delicious salad. Overnight, the central stems had shot up and were looking like they were going to flower. I thought I had waited too long and that the spinach would be bitter. Not at all!

After consulting our friendly nursery manager, we pulled the broccoli and cabbage. Though they grew like gangbusters, she said they likely wouldn’t produce nice heads. We got them in too late. I salvaged four small bunches of cabbage and two tiny buds of broccoli. Richard put them in a minestrone soup. I can’t wait to eat it.