Mrs. P Visits Our 4th Graders And Gets Them Excited About Reading, Writing, Listening, and Being Authors!

    

Last week one of our favorite guests to the library visited for the first time this year.  

Mrs. P!  

                             
Mrs. P came to our library to get our 4th graders excited about reading, writing, listening, and being authors.

We connected in Google Hangout to invite others to participate while she visited too.  Our visit was also recorded in YouTube....you can watch it above at this link.
                             

She joined us on the same day our wonderful friend Susan Verde, the author of The Museum, visited us.  It was a very exciting and fun in our library. 

We invited Mrs. P to the library to also tell us all about her "Be-A-Famous-Writer" Contest.  

The "Be-A-Famous-Writer Contest" started today (September 1st) and closes on November 15, 2013. This is the 5th year of the annual writing contest for children in grades K-4th. The winners will be announced on January 15, 2014.   

In July, I wrote about how Mrs. P has changed her writing contest to focus on classrooms instead of individual writers.  You can read the post here. 

                             

The 4th graders love listening to Mrs. P's stories...She always makes them think and laugh with the stories she tells during our visits.  She helped them brainstorm ideas for the stories they could write for the contest too.  

                                         

Mrs. P also has an app called Mrs. P's Reading Challenge. 

You can get the app in the iTunes store.   

                                  
When we started talking about the app, the 4th graders all got their iPads off of the cart.  We had loaded the app onto their iPads the night before so it was ready to go for the kids.  
                             

They couldn't wait to try it out.  In the app, the readers can pick a story to listen to, answer questions, and win prizes for answering the questions correctly.   It is a lot of fun.  

                             

We thanked Mrs. P and said goodbye for now.....We will see her again in a few weeks when we celebrate Dot Day together.  

Next the 4th graders signed into their Related Arts Portfolio KidBlogs to write about her visit to the library and writing contest. 

                                            

                                     

This is the first time they have used the KidBlog app to create a post in the library....I had so much fun watching them.  They found pictures of Mrs. P online, they looked up the link to her website and writing contest, and asked me for the pictures that I took during our Google Hangout.

                               

     

A few of them got out laptops to make their posts.

I also found Joey using the voice feature within the KidBlog app to make his post.  

I love that they have many different choices on how they create posts on their KidBlog.  This brings even more individuality.  

As Shae says in her post....

"We had a super fun time Mrs. P.....Thank you for visiting us and telling us that we can all be authors."