"I Spy" Author Jean Marzollo In Our Library....What Wonderful Advice She Has For Our 4th Grade Writers

Look what "I Spied" this week at Van Meter....

Author Jean Marzollo in our library with the 4th graders!  

What a special visit this was from the author of the I Spy series.  Jean Skyped with all of the 4th graders and gave them some very important and helpful advice.  

When she started talking to the students, Jean suggested that we record the conversation so one of our students, Shae, got out her iPad to record the Skype.  We had two screens going at the same time....the laptop and the big one behind them....I love the pictures of how everyone was involved in the conversation.  

Over the last few weeks, the fourth graders along with the art teacher, three classroom teachers, and myself have been working on the wonderful collaborative I Spy Van Meter eBook.  

Once we put the pages from each student all together, we uploaded it into FlipSnack to create an eBook that can be easily read and shared.  The first person we sent it to was Jean.  

This book, even though we have published it so it can be shared online, is the first draft of I Spy Van Meter and we wanted her to be able to give feedback easily.  

So during her Skype, Jean picked out seven children and the pages that they created.  She went through what they wrote very carefully, giving helpful suggestions and teaching us how an I Spy riddle rhyme is created. 

Jean encouraged the 4th graders to now go back into their rhymes and rework the words, playing on the comments she had and counting on classmates to listen and give feedback.  

To learn more about Jean's Skype visits you can go to her website. 

I also love the site from Scholastic called Writing I Spy Riddle Rhymes with Jean Marzollo. This gives you really great lessons ideas and examples from other students.  

You can read about how we put the I Spy Van Meter eBook together here.....and this post links to the others about this project. 

We can't wait to start working on the revisions of our riddles.  We learned so much about writing riddle rhymes and working with an editor as a writer.  

Thank you Jean....We can't wait to "Spy You" in our library again.