Ted Staunton visits the Blair library!

As part of Canadian Children's Book Week, the Blair library hosted acclaimed Canadian author Ted Staunton today. In preparation for his visit, the girls from division 8 helped me put together a book week bulletin board and three boys from division 2 created a welcome banner.

We also read Ted's book Puddleman and the first chapter from his latest Morgan book, Music by Morgan. Today during the primary library times, I read the book The Day Eddie Met the Author by Louise Borden to help the students think about "big" questions they could ask the author.

Ted did two presentations this afternoon. During the first session, divisions 8, 9 and 10 listened to Ted play the banjo and they sang along with him as he sang She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain.

Ted read his picture book, Simon's Surprise with the students and had them all joining in.

Ted then showed the students his first version of Puddleman with his own drawings which the students could really relate to...it looked like a book they could make! Victor, from division 8, got to participate as the main character, Michael.

Divisions 6 and 7 listened to Ted read excerpts from some of his novels for older students. One that the students really enjoyed was Forgive Us Our Travises and the episode with the can of soda pop! I bought the book today for our library and I am guessing we'll need to do that experiment next week in the library! He also discussed the writing process a lot with these two classes and highlighted that writing is all about making choices - choices about the best words to use, choices about what makes the story interesting, choices about the order of events, etc.

 Again, he showed the students his first version of Puddleman (which he originally called The Revenge of the Puddleman) which really inspired the students.

During our lunch together, Ted opened his email and found that his publisher had just sent him the final proofs of his next Morgan book. Ted hadn't seen the illustrations yet and he didn't know what the final title was to be until he opened his pdf document. He decided he would like to show it to the students so we hooked up our projector and divisions 6 and 7 at Blair Elementary were the first readers in all of Canada to read parts of the next Morgan book. So cool!

Ted finished off his presented with a fun song from the jug bottle band he plays in back in Ontario.

We had a great afternoon celebrating Canadian Children's Book Week with Ted Staunton!

Ms Novakowski