We had a great time at this year’s Young Authors Day, and everyone was tired by the end of it.
We had 20 groups in 8 classrooms lead by either 8th graders or seniors under the supervision of an elementary classroom teacher. There were three of these groups sessions. I will have to do some tweaking to my schedule next year as groups finished in 15 minutes rather than the 30 I had planned – it may have been the “little” kids were intimidated by the “big” kids. Or, it may have been that they rushed so they could go out to the playground. I have sent a survey to the teachers which will guide me next year during the planning stages.
Overall the teachers and I were pleased with the results. I’ve seen at least one student since Young Authors Day pull the Head of School over to show off his book.
We had a fabulous young lady join us as our guest speaker in the afternoon.
Alyssa Melhorn is the illustrator of several children’s books including Bella’s Broken Leg by Sherry B. Sauskojus and Vicki V. Lucas and the May the K9 Spy series by KD Frantzen and others. She did a wonderful job. She engaged the kiddos and kept the interest of all the students developmental kinder through fifth grade. We had allotted 30-40 minutes thinking that that would be the extent of attention spans at the end of the day but it really could have been longer. Because we are a Christian school, Alyssa was able to share her calling from God as an artist. One of the things that the students really liked was “helping” her to dray a character. She asked them questions for identifying characteristics of a character she is working on and then drew the character according to those specifications. She then shared the sketch she had recently completed for the character based on the authors specifications. It really was a lot of fun.
You can find my original post, which has more details about the planning here.
You can get a copy of the editable document I used for my Young Authors Day here.
Have you ever participated in a Young Authors Day? What was done to make it a successful day?