Archive for the ‘Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator’ Category

Update: I’ll be at the Mississippi Reading Association annual conference on Tuesday, speaking about Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator and Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature, and contributing to a session on making the most of school visits.

The weather warmed up this weekend. It was beautiful for soccer on Saturday and perfect for snail hunting on Sunday. I have a wolfsnail right now that I’m keeping for some video and school visits so I need to keep it fed. I spent about 20 minutes pulling weeds and dead impatiens from my butterfly garden and I found about 25 garden snails. After I washed the two snail containers with rainwater from my rain barrel, I fed the wolfsnail. It ate a garden snail and a slug. Yum! I wish I had had time for video, but we were also cooking meals for the week.

We took about 840 photographs during three soccer games on Saturday. I went through carefully today and flagged 115. It will take some time to get all those processed, but I am posting a few of my favorites today.

This is Zach in the midst of a shot.

Jayda in a warm-up boot.
Austin and a defender in step, with Judson behind.
Emily setting up a shot.

What a wonderful surprise in the mail today: Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator, in Chinese!!

I first learned about this edition in my semi-annual royalty statement back in April, but it is really exciting to see the actual product, which I got from Andy Boyles, my editor at Boyds Mills Press. I didn’t take an image of an inside page, but the English words are right there on the page with the Chinese. I can’t read a word of Chinese, but, as luck would have it, a longtime friend is coming for Thanksgiving who is Chinese. I can’t wait to hear what she thinks of the translation. This is very exciting!

My semiannual royalty statement came this week and it included an entry I didn’t understand. When I checked on it, I found out that Boyds Mills Press has contracted with a company in China that wishes to publish Wolfsnail in the Chinese market. In this pay period, I received a modest advance against (hoped for) future royalties. This will be interesting. I hope I will see a Chinese copy someday.

Speaking of the royalty statement, I am pleased with the fact that both books continue to sell. After nearly a year on the market, Growing Patterns remains well behind Wolfsnail in lifetime sales, but, if Amazon’s numbers from book scan (in Author Central data – NOT sales rank) are to be believed, Growing Patterns is outselling Wolfsnail this Spring.

More Thank You Notes

When I was California earlier this year, I visited Liz Woodward’s fourth grade class at the International Community School. You can read about the visit here. These are some of the thank you notes I got from the students.

With pencil writing against the blue background, this may be hard for you to read so here it is transcribed:

“Thank you for teaching us about the wolfsnails. Thank you for expeachly teaching us the Fibonacci numbers. They come from nature. Thank you for giving me advice for writing a book. Althoo I’m not the greatest neat writer I want this thank you letter to touch your heart.”

It did, Hector.
 

During my recent trip to San Francisco, I visited St. Matthews Episcopal Day School. You can read about the visit here. I received a large envelope of thank you notes. Here are a few:

As always, I had a wonderful three days at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival in Hattiesburg. In today’s post I’ll just talk about my session: “It’s a Snap!” I talked about ways to use digital photography to get kids excited about reading, writing, books in general, and nature.

I shared some photographs of mine, some activities I’ve used with success in classrooms and libraries, and some photographs taken by students.

For the final segment of workshop, attendees used their cameras (or borrowed mine) to take some photographs of some things I brought in for display.

I very much appreciate the help I got from CBF ambassador Sarah M. Walsh, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She took the photographs during my session and helped with set-up and take down.

Here are some of the photographs taken by attendees using my cameras. Nice, huh?

If you were in the session and you want to share some of the photographs you took with your camera, please contact me via email here.

One of the best things about school visits is the mail that I get from students after I get home. I have a few letters I’d like to share here. The first batch are from Washington School in Greenville, Miss. Read my post about the visit here.

 

I blogged about my school visits in the San Francisco area, but once I moved on to the NSTA conference, I stopped posting updates. There were a few reasons for this: First, I moved into The Palace Hotel and they charged for internet in the rooms (I still don’t understand why budget hotels provide free internet and breakfast and so-called luxury hotels charge through the nose for both). Second, I was working from breakfast to supper and falling asleep after a few clicks of my Kindle.

Boyds Mills Press rented a corner booth in the conference exhibit hall and my editor, Andy Boyles (pictured above helping M. make a Fibonacci Folding Book), and I were responsible for greeting conferees. Andy arranged display copies of all of BMP’s science titles around the walls of the booth. We set up a table in the front of the booth with display copies of Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator and Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature. I put out my two mini-quilts (here and here), some private eye loupes, a pinecone, a nautilus shell, a sample Fibonacci Folding Book, and a stack of my postcards. I’ve gone to two other national conferences, the 2009 American Library Association meeting in Chicago and the 2010 International Reading Association convention (also in Chicago). In those cases, I was one of many BMP authors and illustrators who signed books. I was scheduled for an hour on each day. This time, I was signing all day every day. We left the booth only for three presentations (two featured information about 2011 Outstanding Science Trade Books) and a lunch meeting. I met lots of interesting people — some who teach science to kids, others who teach teachers how to teach science to kids, and people who work with organizations that promote science education.

We sold all the copies of Growing Patterns that BMP shipped and could have sold at least a dozen more. It helped that many teachers had seen the feature article about the 2011 Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12 in Science & Children, NSTA’s magazine for elementary school teachers. Andy and I had a great time having lunch with current, former, and future members of the Outstanding Science Trade Book selection committee, including Suzanne Flynn, J. Carrie Launius, Betty Crocker, Steve Rich, Karen Ostlund, Kristin Rearden, and Juliana Texley. We also met Lauren Jonas and Emily Brady, who are on staff at NSTA and help coordinate the NSTA Recommends program and the OSTB list. We learned about the process and met some great people. Most of them seem to be on their second or third career. They started in classrooms teaching kids and then went into either administration or into teaching teachers at the college or post-graduate level.

They had stories about using trade books in classrooms. Juliana told me about the time she took flowers on an airplane so she could use them in a presentation about my book. They didn’t like the dry environment and shriveled beyond use. She had to hit a grocery store for replacements. One plant she bought was a peace lily (featured in the book to illustrate 1). When it was time to go home, she put it in her suitcase. “I threw some clothes away and made room for it,” she said. “It’s still doing fine.”

Right after lunch, I participated in a session featuring the 2011 NSTA/CBC Outstanding Science Trade Books led by some of the teachers at the luncheon. Other authors with winning books who participated were: Debbie S. Miller, who wrote Survival at 40 Below, and Seymour Simon, who wrote Global Warming.

The final session Andy and I attended was led by Seymour Simon and centered on the changes in children’s book publishing being driven by electronic devices. Simon and his wife, Liz Nealon, who has worked in many creative capacities over the years including with Sesame Street, talked about the growing numbers of children and families who have access to electronic reading devices such as Kindles, iPads, Nooks, iPhones, etc. Simon demonstrated how he has begun publishing some of his out-of-print titles in electronic format. His talk was very inspiring and I left there thinking about how I could get some e-publishing going.

I mentioned it to Richard when I got home and he’s spent a good amount of time this week building an iPhone app for Wolfsnail. How cool is that?!

Today I drove down to Oakland to visit fourth grade students at the International Community School and Think College Now. Thank you, Ms. Woodard and Ms. Hatscheck. Your students asked great questions and gave me tons of things to think about. Read about my visit with students at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Day School here.

I spent the morning at St. Matthew’s Episcopal School in San Mateo, CA. I talked about Wolfsnail and Growing Patterns with two groups (fourth and fifth graders, and sixth and seventh graders). I found the school through an old friend, whose three kids attend St. Matthew’s.

I spent a great day with students and teachers at Washington School. I had sessions with first graders through fifth graders and the emphasis shifted over the course of the day from more Wolfsnail to more Growing Patterns. The students had wonderful questions; there were a bunch of young scientists in the library that day. Thank you, Louise Potin, elementary librarian at Washington School, for the invitation and the tremendous time.