Eileen Christelow - Vermont Author & Illustrator

Eileen Christelow visited our school on May 22, 2014, thanks to a grant from our generously supportive PTO. 

http://www.christelow.com/index.html

     Having an author visit your school is always a treat; you get to bask in their light and absorb their wisdom and experiences for the day.  It proved true with Eileen! On their way to their classrooms when they first arrived in the morning, the kids peeked into the library .  All the shelves have been pushed out of the way and the space looks cavernous.  "Whoaaaa! Is she here yet?" they whispered.  Not yet, but soon!, I told them.  The excitement in the air is nearly tangible.  The whole school has been reading Eileen Christelow's books for the last month or so.  I have raided nearly every public library in my county of their copies of Eileen's books, so that we have lots available for my big school.  We have read, we have laughed, we have noticed, we have explored, we have adored.  I think we are ready for her!

     As an aside, Eileen has two great websites.  Visit them here and here.  They have lots of fun activities and cool comic strip interviews by the adorable Emma dog to read. (Make sure to see the pictures of Emma and her felted look-alike further down the page.)

Our second graders love Eileen Christelow's books!

Eileen Christelow has had a very prolific career, writing more than 30 books.

     

Eileen's first published book - 1982    and      most recently published - 2013

Some are inspired by true stories:           

Some are mysteries:      

Some are just downright fun:      

Some are nonfiction:
        


And all of them are laugh-out-loud great!

Multiple times the children would exclaim at the end of the story, "Thaat was a good story!"  I absolutely love to hear children say that.  In this age of digital everything, I am thrilled when a seemingly old-fashioned technology pulls the rug right out from under us.  Eileen is a masterful storyteller.  She knows how to put a twist at the end of the story that takes everyone by surprise, completely undoing our predictions.  And her illustrations?  So much fun!  There's a lot going on in her pictures, and readers soon learn they have to keep their eyes peeled for those details that give clues to the story.  

We learned about Eileen's early years as a writer.  The slides were drawn by Eileen and particularly engaging.
  

It is so cool to watch

 an artist draw!

How to add expressions with eyebrows

Eileen shows the students how to change a character's expression with a few simple lines.

Signing books after lunch

Voila!

Lulu the Babysitter comes to life before our very eyes!

What does Lulu see when she opens the door?  It's a great writing prompt. You take the story from here!

Our Main Hallway display of The Art of Hope and Healing from Vermont authors & illustrators

The Desperate Dog Writes Again (2010) - gift from Eileen Christelow

Five Dog Night (1993) - gift from Eileen Christelow

We all love the Emma books:

                 

http://www.christelow.com/all-about-emma.html

And here is the felted Emma modeled from the books

top view

sideview

Thank you, Eileen Christelow, for coming to our school.  We were honored to have you visit us!  We are looking forward to your next story.  Whatever it is, we know it will be wonderful!

Red Clover News

The World's Greatest Lion wins the 2014 Red Clover Award, Vermont's children's choice picture book award. The voting results shown below reveal it is a favorite with all grade levels at EES, and a favorite with children grades K through 4 across the state of Vermont.

Jason Chin : Nonfiction Author Visits Essex Elementary

In early January we started preparing for Jason Chin's visit on February 7th.  Jason Chin lives in Vermont, and way back in July of 2013 he agreed to visit our school during the winter of 2014.   Thanks to a very supportive PTO who grants us funding every year to afford a visiting author, we have been able to invite many notable authors to our school, including April Pulley Sayre, Jim Arnosky, G. Brian Karas, and Tracy Campbell Pearson, to name just a few.

The first of Mr. Chin's books that we read with our Kindergarteners, First and Second graders was Redwoods. We followed the young boy and the flying squirrel into the California Coast Redwoods rainforest.  The next week we explored vocabulary words that were associated with water, and examined the comparison of the redwoods' bark to the tiles on the space shuttle.  National Geographic has some wonderful pictures and videos that helped us understand just how large these trees can grow.  Click here to see what we used.


We loved reading Coral Reefs with its stunningly beautiful illustrations.  This time a young girl and a crab were our guides through the coral reef.  Our children used their powers of observation to notice the subtle changes in the library's reading room as the corals and puddles of water first appeared, until the library became totally submerged in the ocean.  We followed up with hands-on exploration of real pieces of coral using magnifying glasses.  We really could see the tiny dimples where the polyps had lived on the coral skeletons!

Island is a very ambitious book, spanning six million years in time.  It is quite hard for any of us to get our minds around that concept of time.  As with Mr. Chin's other books, we used Google Earth to visit the actual geographical location, the Galapagos Islands, a substitute for visiting the real places the way Jason did.  I was amazed at how quickly children could locate those tiny islands on our globe!



 We also took a look at a couple of other books that Jason Chin illustrated but did not write.


 

After reading Jason Chin's books we were ready for the big day!  Our welcome sign was up:

and our display case was decorated with flying squirrels, banana slugs, corals, sea horses, sea stars, crabs, tortoises, and marine iguanas all hand-colored by the children.

  

 

Jason asked the children what they do when they want to learn more about something of interest, which turns out to be exactly what our author does: look in books, look on the internet, talk with experts, and visit the place (if possible).

 

Jason was so engaging that our preschoolers were able to sit still for the entire 45-minute presentation.  He told us stories from his travels, such as the young sea lion who played underwater with him until the sea lion mother showed up. Uh-oh!

 He makes sketches and models to help him be accurate.  Jason made this astronaut model to draw the illustrations for Gravity.  Here he is posing in our library with his spaceman (the shelves are all pushed together to make room for his presentation). 
 

We also got to see his revision process with several of his very early drafts.  First drafts start small, as in the photo below, but as the details of the book get more developed the later drafts are made bigger, such as the one on the left.

  
 Towards the end of each presentation Jason gave us a treat by drawing for us.  Each drawing started with the words, "When I opened the book it took me to _____."  A student was chosen to pose holding a book, and then he asked other students to suggest things to be in the picture.  We were gobsmacked by his talent!

We got a sneak peek at Gravity, and now we can't wait to buy copies for our library!  Phoenix Books in Burlington is throwing a book launch party for him on May 3rd at 2:00 pm.

Children and teachers enjoyed your presentations, 

Jason Chin!

Thank you for a most 

marvelous day!

Tumblebooks - now available at EES

Great News!  The Learning Center has recently subscribed to another wonderful database: TumbleBooks!

The TumbleBookLibrary is a collection of TumbleBooks (animated, talking picturebooks) with fiction, non-fiction and foreign language titles, Read-Alongs (chapter books with sentence highlighting and narration but no animation), TumbleTV which consists of pre-set playlists of a sequence of books, Tumble Puzzles & Games, and TumbleResources for teachers and students. TumbleBooks are created from existing picture books which are licensed from children's book publishers and converted to the TumbleBookformat.

TumbleMobile:

You can also access Tumblebooks via any reading/mobile device that has an internet connection (for example: color nook, kindle fire, Ipads & Ipod touch users); the site should automatically redirect you to “TumbleBookLibrary: For iPads and Mobile Devices”. If not, please click on the drop down menu at the top right corner and choose “Mobile” then “Go”.

Tumblebooks require the latest Flash plugin (8.x or later). You can get it here: http://www.adobe.com/go/getFlashPlayer 

Fans of Robert Munsch will be glad to discover that TumbleBooks has available many of his titles in both English and Spanish. 

More favorites are Doreen Cronin's trilogy of titles : Diary of a Fly; Diary of a Spider, and Diary of a Worm.

                                

 

You won't want to miss the 2011 Red Clover award winner, 
Let's Do Nothing! by Tony Fucile.

Access the TumbleBooks library through the Learning Center website here.

Questions?  Please contact Mrs. Scrimgeour at cscrimgeour@etsd.org or 802-857-2140, or drop in and see me in the Learning Center.