Children’s Author and Illustrator Event

I was lucky enough to get out to Kutztown University’s  Children’s Literature Conference this past Saturday and was pleasantly surprised by much of the conference.  Matt Phelan, Seymour Simon, and Thomas Yezerski each had a session and were available for autographs.  They also include a Book Review section each year.  Sadly, fewer and fewer people are able to attend the conference – most likely due to limited budgets for both schools and libraries.

I didn’t really like The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan when I read it, so I was wondering what his talk would be about and surprisingly I really enjoyed his speech and just read his new graphic novel Around the World – which I enjoyed so much more than The Storm in the Barn.  I’m never very excited about graphic novels, they personally are not my favorite style of writing, but I really enjoyed Around the World.

Seymour Simon is a joy to listen to.  I believe he is around 80 years old and was a science teacher for over 20 years before he wrote over 250 children’s books – about almost any science topic you could imagine!  He is so funny to listen to and had the audience in stitches for most of his speech!  He also has a spectacular website with a number of resources that are sure to help teachers, parents, and librarians alike!

Overall, it was a very good day filled with new information that I brought back to my job and hope to be able to use with new programming ideas.  In the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion about the importance of teaching children about informational text – something I’ll have to look into for the fall!