 I'm sure both or you are all familiar with these two faces but Susan has been teaching at Union Elementary for maybe as long okay I won't put a number on it but we'll say maybe as long as you guys have been riding bikes but not as long as Mary Mello has been there. And before that I was at Berry Town School so I had the privilege of having Katie Green in my class. Oh that's wonderful. You probably don't know that part. I don't know that part. That's the most important thing about Susan. Wow you do. We go way back. That's wonderful. Susan was Vermont Teacher of the Year in 2016 which took her to high and mighty places and you've been around the world traveling with a National Geographic Fellowship so Antarctica and Arctic. No the Arctic. Do you do that all the time? You must do it all the time. I skipped kindergarten. I can't blame it on anything. Arctic polar bears. Yep. Perfect. You guys. It would be a lot easier. It's true. There were books showing them both together. Right yeah yeah. And you've been working with authors for a long time in the classroom. Most recently I think Katie Farber was in Union Elementary. So she has a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience working in partnership with picture book authors and others. Kristi Manali has been writing nonfiction. Hey there. Join us. That was an entrance. I know. So you've been writing nonfiction articles. You've written, you've helped work on activity books, financial geographic. You'll have to fill in the blanks for me but you had two books come out last year. Hey hey hey. And we diet for a changing climate which is nonfiction about nutrition, health of the climate and how they relate to one another for young adults. There's insect eating in it. And we see it was on the long list for the green books. Oh they just came out. That's great. Oh you and Katie Farber are on that. That's wonderful. Congratulations. Let's all in here. So I'm just gonna shut up now. Pardon me. Do you have that book? I don't have that book. It's um it's it's it's for the school and library market so it's library bound and it costs 37 bucks. Oh okay. We are happy to make it for you but I'm happy to show it to you. So I'm gonna get out of the way and let you two do your thing. Thank you so much for committing to come back. Come in. This is such a nice group. We're excited. If you don't know us that well. There is a camera. Yes and we are being recorded. Just so you know. You could just edit out Grace if you need to. Yeah anything she says. Oh I wouldn't dare. Oh thank you. Thank you very much. They're delicious. So we thought it we're so glad you came today. We thought it would be good to start off with like a full disclosure that we have been together in a readers club a book club here in town book group reading yeah for about 18 years and um we have met monthly for 18 years to talk about books and so that started our relationship as friends and then um and book lovers and book lovers and as Chris started moving along and started doing some of her writing we started to develop this working relationship as well and so we thought it would be really fun to share a little bit about how that's been going and share some ideas that have worked for you well right right and um I I think you might know everyone here but I don't know quite and I know we have a writer so okay so maybe if we can just get a sense of what angle everyone comes from I think they're all different which is really fun um that would be helpful to us and maybe everybody and we're hoping that it's especially with a group this size that it can be a back and forth conversation because we have some ideas um and I know you'll have lots of ideas also as we go along so I think we heard a little bit about you that you're at UVM right I work with the pre-service teachers and um we currently spend a lot of time the licensure categories first through third grade and um I tend to um get them when they move out to the public schools in the k3 context so and I'm just a lover of great books okay it's interesting because I have one student teacher right now and she's at allen brook and she's um doing this little um little project on vermont authors and then um I she teaches she's in kindergarten and then I happen to be down here and I saw this poster and I'm like the whole thing just kind of clicked for me so I dropped down terrific um so I work at candle week press wonderful I've worked there 22 years I'm the editorial director the one of them so I work on picture books uh really for babies up through young adult fiction and non-fiction I do work with several um vermont authors like Tobin Anderson somebody I've worked with the whole time I've been at candle week so when we started working together he was 29 and I was 39 and now he's 51 and I'm 61 that's been sort of a long long vermont connection um I've always wanted to move to vermont um because Amy Ehrlich who is my predecessor at candle wake lived up here and I used to come visit her and think oh this would be so perfect I could work from home so finally 22 years later I'm actually doing that so I have a house in Huntington and this is my dear friend grace green who you all know oh no I don't I don't know oh all right and what did you name Liz she did go on for quite a while with us I got Susan and Susan so yeah and I'm grace grace green um I used to be the youth services consultant for vermont department of libraries so I used I used to do a lot of things now I'm just retired and hang out but and I'm sure and sit around one of the programs that I liked to do was how to treat an author properly um and because it just drives me crazy when authors are mistreated or worse still um just people are not prepared at all so I would collect stories from authors about horrible experiences they had at schools and libraries at schools and libraries when doing their visits when doing their visits oh yeah no I didn't get into their personal they can be badly treated but as Susan said that my claim to fame is that my daughter was in her class in the first and second grade at Berrytown and she's a kindergarten teacher she graduated from the LA program she did yes she did because I remember that because I know you're a legend and I do you know me she is a legend I came in I had I interviewed you once I just wanted to learn oh did you yeah but that's okay and I think I knew about your daughter oh you're of course okay good yeah my daughter's a kindergarten teacher at St. Monica's St. Michael's in wonderful yeah and also the red clover program oh yeah well yeah we well the department of libraries whose program is this the department of libraries runs all three of the children's choice awards children's book choice awards in Vermont and the red clover one is the do you know them that oh yeah okay all right yeah the red clover one is the picture book one so they're dear to my heart yes yes I got the trivia question at Chittenden or at People's United correct yesterday they were asking about the state flower and red clover was like oh oh I think that's a wonderful I think every Vermont child will get that question correct because it's so instrumental and how about Vermont being the one state that passed the citizenship test did you see that in the paper yesterday? No. So the, who is it, Eisenhower Institute or some institute gave some hundreds of people in every state questions from the United States Citizenship Test. Yeah. One state the majority of people passed. It was our state. I mean that's great but it's scary too. Yeah. And our rate was 65%. 65% got passed the test right. Yeah. Could that say something about the lack of first degree immigrants in the moment? I mean first generation immigrants in the moment? No. Somebody fought that and it's in the free press. There's an article in the free press but somebody fought that and they talked about how that wasn't necessarily the case. It was probably the reverse in fact. The people who have just taken and passed the test are the ones that are more likely to know. Right. But yeah. Good. Anyway. Also in the paper yesterday that Ralph Ellison wrote while in Vermont. I didn't know that. I'm learning so much. We're so glad you came. You have friends in the Bad River Valley. Yes. Yeah. All right. Thank you everybody. Oh, so you didn't say who you are. That's right. I'm Carolyn Korsko Patoni. I'm also a children's book author and I got to do a visit with you. Yeah. So yeah, I got to do a visit with Susan. It was really great and I really enjoyed it. You would get to know who you are. I do what I want to tell you. You know, when I had that job I knew every single children's book author and now I am so far beyond. Hi, it's nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Carolyn not only met with my class, she met with all 81st graders. Oh, did you? Oh, that's great. I have to just note that that's an accomplishment. It was great. And I'm also doing, I do presentations with Children's Literacy Foundation. So that's been fun to get out and getting into different areas, not just around. Right. I used to be on that board when I was somebody. I think you're still somebody. Fade to the nick. So we wanted this workshop to work for you guys today. So we have some things that we have, you know, gathered and we wanted to talk about, but if there are other things don't hesitate to speak up and ask or let us know or, you know, let us know for mistreating authors. We don't want to be doing that. We wouldn't be doing that. Right. The idea is to help educators know how not to mistreat authors and how to make a school visit as productive as it can be. And we're not mostly talking about the traditional school visits where an author comes and presents to a whole school and the auditorium and has a whole sort of presentation. We're more going to talk about what we've been doing, which is at a classroom level, developing sort of a long term relationship between one writer and one classroom, which I really love. And obviously, I'm well aware that there are many writers who make a lot of their income doing the big visits. And I don't want to undercut that at all. I think a lot of what we talk about can make the big visits better also. But I didn't feel comfortable with that level yet. I'm a pretty new picture book writer, although I'd written school and library books for a few years. And I just love the way we've put together a learning experience that I get a lot out of as well as the kids getting a lot out of. So that's what we're talking about. And so when we started off, Chris actually thought I was doing her a favor. I thought she was doing me a favor. And so, you know, go ahead. Yeah. She said, well, do you want to come and read to my class? And at this point, I didn't, my picture book wasn't out. So I had educational books out. This was my first book that came out. And I thought she was honestly doing this as an active charity to me, because it was such a great chance for me to go and talk to a small and manageable group of first graders with a teacher that I already knew and liked. And I didn't realize until later that you were doing it for your own, you know, you thought it would be good for you. It was advantageous to me. And so at our school, we used the Lucy Calkins reading workshop and writing workshop as a sort of a template for how to go through the year and which teaching points to hit. And so one of the common core standards for writers who are in first grade is to learn how to write nonfiction. And it's presented as how to books or teaching books. And so, you know, we kind of were starting this unit and the kids were kind of just like writing what they thought like how to take care of a cat, you know, like you need to get a cat and then you feed it and then you pet it and you take care of it. It was very, very basic and they weren't really understanding that they would need to maybe do some research or maybe do some learning in order to be better writers. And so I was that's when I invited Chris to come in and talk about writing some nonfiction. And she did this great thing where she brought a whole bunch of how to books in, for examples. And I know it sounds really simple, like I should have thought of that, but it had not occurred to me and she brought I went to the library. Yeah, she went to the Kellogg Hubbard and came with a stack of how to books. One of my favorites was how to read to a slug, how to read to a snail or something like that. But they all, you know, followed the format of how to do something. And so that was really, really inspiring. These are some of the anchor charts that we use with the program, just to give people an idea of each day you sort of have some teaching points that you present to the kids. And then that's the little mini lesson. And because there's six, the mini lesson is about six minutes. And then they go off and write. And so this year, in particular, Chris and I really focused hard on some of the actual teaching points. Right. So this is one of the key words of wisdom that Susie has for educators in doing this, is that it works best if you bring a writer in to talk about a specific point that the class is learning at that point. So Susie said, we're doing nonfiction writing right now and we're having a really hard time figuring out how to do the table of contents. And so she said, can you come in and help us with the table of contents? So I said, absolutely, that sounds like fun. Right. And so I brought in some books that had interesting tables of contents. And, you know, one of them was my book. And we had a little mini lesson. I gave a mini lesson. It's like, but it was fun. Yeah. And it was really fun. And, you know, it's the thing that I hadn't sort of hashed out. And Chris helped with his use, the way it's introduced is sort of they write a whole book, then they go back and make the table of contents, which as publishers, you know, but six year olds and myself, I kind of didn't really think that through. And so Chris had come when kids had some content already written. And then they were going back and trying to think about how they organized it and what the headers were. And so I do have some published books. This is what a published book looks like. It's got some fancy binding. These are close to publication. And I talked to the kids about sharing their work today. And they asked me to ask you to be quite careful with their role. You can share it, but ask them to be very careful. But as you can see, let's see, this is this one. So this was before Chris came, we had each published one book without a table of contents. So this was learning about Power Rangers. And this one was San Francisco, which you had just visited. So that was fun. So it was sort of like they were writing information and doing research, but they didn't have headers and they didn't have an organized pattern. But then we did get some organization going. And I'm trying to find the word about pets. So this was how to have a pet. And it's close to publication. And she has what you need, pets like, and what kinds of pets for her table of contents. And so then she's got some headers up here. And so when Chris came, it helped us with that. And then we decided we needed a second visit. Because a couple of weeks later, the task was to work on introductions and conclusions, which is super hard when you're six. And this one about it, but you can't write about it as much. So this one, we really wanted to, I wish we had documented more because when Chris first came, this student had, did you ever want a pet in your life? That was her introduction. Really pretty snazzy. Very good. And you liked it. We liked it very much. But we had that time, Chris was able to come, and we divided the kids into small groups, and she was really able to get them to elaborate more on their introductions. So we ended up with, did you ever want a pet in your life? Look in this book, and you will learn about pets. For first grade, that's quite an introduction. And so we really spent some time working on introductions. This is the one that she wanted me to share with you. They never got to see all about the continents. This is a book about the continents. Did you ever want to learn about them? Read this book to find out, and you will see what you can learn. But right, the big idea is there, like it's coming. And then this is a student who struggles a little more with his writing, all about snakes. And his table of contents was, how do snakes move, packs, and dens? And his introduction. This is my absolute favorite. Do snakes freak you out? Read my book. He's got style. Exactly. And he's got the voice going. This was after we had a couple of sessions together. And one of the things, and I'll let you talk about this a little bit, because this was kind of a magical time, one of the things Chris did when she came. Well, yeah, I didn't realize how well this would go over. But as I was preparing to talk about introductions, I went through my collection. I did not write this one, but I brought it in because it has a nice introduction. And I explained what the introduction, this introduction talks about how you use this book and what's in this book. And so I used that to illustrate the concept. And I offered to leave the book for the class. Well, it turns out that the class really likes this book, which I didn't think was written for first graders, but they just apparently are pouring over it and talking about the design of it. And somebody looked at the table of contents and said, oh my goodness, this is the longest table of contents on the planet. And I couldn't find it yesterday. Of course, I wanted to bring it to show you when it was squirreled away in someone's desk. I finally found it. But yeah, sort of broadening horizons and talking concretely about here's why you want an introduction in a book. And that was helpful to them to think about at the level of, you know, first grade books. So they I love my visits with this classroom because the kids are so engaged and excited. I mean, they have a really outstanding teacher in the first place. But to have an outside person who's a real author is is kind of a special a special thing for them. And I learned a ton about how kids think and what kids, you know, react to positively and all those things which are terrifically important to me as a writer for this age group. Yeah, I think the magic of the code teaching model is there, you know, the magic of great teaching is presenting information in a lot of different ways because you never know who's going to take in what. And so I did want to share one of the funny stories. The first time Chris came and met this year's class, I had just kept saying we're going to have an author visit and authors coming to visit. And Chris walked in the door and he turns to me and said, I thought it was going to be a man. And I thought how like my mind is like, what have I done? Like, why is he thinking this? And I said, well, why did you think that? And he's like, well, it's probably because I'm a boy. And so I was just thinking it would be a man. And I was like, okay, okay. Lesson and also you had said Chris and Chris. I hadn't said your name. I just kept saying author, author. Interesting. But I got a little worried. And then I, when he said, it's just probably because I'm a boy. That makes me feel a little bit better. Yeah, that's an okay thing. Yeah. And so it's been, it's been really interesting to explore that concept. And so, you know, the point of sharing this work is like, the advanced planning that goes in. And that's, we all know that's what good teaching entails. But I think the first couple of times that we met, we didn't do that as well. You know, it was sort of like, come on and read. And then Chris read and then it was sort of what do we do next. Really tying it into something and tying it into something that we're already doing, like so that it's not an add on, I think a lot of teachers are feeling overwhelmed in general. And really being able to tie this to our curriculum and the common core and best practice and what kids need is the crucial element. And I think helping to spread that message to educators. So it's not an interruption. It's not time out of the lesson plan. It's not a lost day. It's reinforcing and moving on with your work with like an extra helper, an extra set of hands. And from the writer's perspective, so much better than sort of showing up and nobody knows what you're doing and nobody's read your book and nobody is necessarily prepared and possibly not paying very much attention. These are some of the stories I've heard. This is a really sort of easy way to get really deeply engaged with a classroom full of readers and writers. And I think it's powerful. Like a lot of times I would say probably every day there's a reference to remember in Chris's moose book how she had a diagram of a life cycle that comes up almost every day because Chris talked about how in nonfiction often there's a life cycle. So they're very into sort of adding this when we're talking a lot of your books were about animals. So we were talking about the table of contents and the chapter headings too and everyone like moose reproduced. And so that's where we have the life cycle. That's where we have the life cycle diagram. And everyone just really remembered that and they started writing life cycles in their books about animals. So that was fun for everybody. And just kind of the different text features too. You know it's really great to have it. But it comes up, Chris comes up a lot like in discussions and in mini lessons. And so that's really valuable you know to know an author and to have something as a reference point I think is really enriching their experience as learners. Well and a writer is a real person. A real person can be a writer is this lesson that I didn't get until I was already a writer. You know writers were like up there somewhere for me. And so these kids like people write and that's a really valuable lesson I think. And Chris doesn't even know this but she worked with a small group at the table and she did not get to work with everyone. So they're hoping that maybe she can come back and work with them at the table too. It's kind of a special treat to work there. Okay now the pressure's on. Yeah and so the classroom visits you know are really valuable. There are also some other models that we've used. When Carolyn came we actually put that up. Sure. Carolyn we had 80 children and so at that point we were looking at craft moves that authors take. So the curriculum as you know like a healthy curriculum is sort of spiraling around. And so we're moving from narratives to non-fiction to back to narratives making them a little more complex back to information books again. But at this point in the year and I'm sorry the poster's so raggedy. Learning craft moves from a mentor author. Yeah so we why this was kind of an interesting one because Carolyn was doing one of those sort of bigger presentations. She was reading her her book and the kids were doing an activity but as she was reading we were kind of noticing some of the things in the story. And we were pulling them out and then hopefully kids were emulating this in their writing. And it really happened especially ellipsis. Good lord. But there are ellipsis and then in this book there's some great examples of that. And it was really fun to hear you talk about some of the choices weren't actually yours in terms of the text features or the craft moves. And some of them were. But that was kind of the special part about hearing you read and talk about it. And so in that scenario we had to move to the Kellogg Hubbard to fit everybody in and there was also the story walk. So that was sort of a multi-disciplinary approach to to learning craft moves. But again it was sort of this reference point later on to go back to well I'm using an ellipse or I did have a student who used alliteration and really kept talking about the bumpy brittle brown stick. And so it's really I think powerful to have these real examples from authors. And it was super great to have Susie. That's not me. To have Susie be able to capture things as you're going along and you're talking about it and the kids are it really helped because when I would say something or or if you would even lead us in a different sort of direction it was already right up there for the kids to see and refer to and remember. So the reading I think we read it through once and then we went back and kind of dissected it a little bit which was really helpful because you know I would ask the kids to what are you noticing here and somebody would usually and you were very adapted getting everybody to have a chance to speak. And we had read you know the teachers I think probably each had read the book maybe three or four times already so they had seen capitals or exclamation marks or ellipses. They really love ellipses they just love it. It's like I don't know if it's developmental or what it is but they love ellipses. It was a cool new thing right and it's got suspense. I mean that's what life is about. Yeah and I think that I think it was really helpful to hear like we had read it three or four times but to have you read this is different right like as a reader you can think about phrasing but when somebody needs you grace but having you read it was really really special so we appreciate that time that you took to meet with us. Well it was really fun. It is fun isn't it? It was like working with the with that many children. Well it was it was it was great yeah I mean I definitely. She did two sessions of 40 okay because 80 was because 80 sounds. I wouldn't I I think I would have been terrified if I didn't have. Well there were like four teachers there too. Yeah and so there was there was definitely the the right level of support. The I had done you know we had met before we had we had I sort of brainstormed and outlined already of what we we were going to do so I sort of knew what you know wasn't like my typical author presentation but it was you know sort of had some of those elements and then you know with all the support it was it was great. And when the after where there was a craft to make a like a puppet and you could have the feelings these little symbols for feelings and then there was the story walk so the kid they could make a craft and then go outside and read the story on the post. So it was there were a lot of options. Well the story is about a walk in the woods so the story walk was a natural that was my that was my launch you know when I did the book launch that was and that's why your publisher came up with that. Exactly I think that's why my publisher made the story walk was because it was for the for the launch but I've also had it up on the state house lawn and you know it's a nice thing to have. And I don't know if you remember that year but we actually had a student that shared the name of the main character. Oh yes that's right so that was kind of special not a very yeah so that was just kind of like everyone was like you know I know me. But there's that connection part that's so cool yeah so that was that was kind of special that you chose that.