This conference created for educators, librarians and aspiring writers has been celebrating the best in children’s literature for 20 years, and it was an honor for the fifth grade class to be invited back again to lead one of the breakout sessions at this event.
“Being organized is key,” Lawson said, and to this end our class began preparing over a month in advance by studying a specific author, Mike Graf, and preparing visual aids about him and his books to use at the Friday session they hosted.
To begin, our class kept journals and split up into groups of six students to read four of Mike Graf’s adventure books set in our National Parks. We kept journals of the stories we read which helped when we began comparing and contrasting the characters and settings from these four books. This in turn helped us make display boards, a mock newspaper, magazine, songs, movie trailer, and morning talk show for the conference. These were ideas teachers could take with them to use to with their students as a fun way to learn more about a subject they are studying.
To help these mockups be as “real looking as possible,” said Sacred Heart fifth grader Victoria Bacon, “we used apps such as iMovie.” Her group did a movie trailer. The group that was creating a newspaper pulled on the expertise of a fifth grade parent who is a former newspaper reporter. In the end our extra efforts paid off when Graf asked several of the groups to send him their finished products for him to use on his website or when he visits schools in the future.
When presenting our projects at the University of Redlands, the respectful, interested attention of Graf, and the dozen or so other people in the audience, made for a happy experience after all their hard work.
“It was a great experience meeting him,” Adam Bauby said, “It was really fun to show him the projects. He was very excited to see what we did.”
At the end of the session we took a picture with Graf and he signed our books, and all had a very fun, productive day.