Monday April 29th was an incredible day here, we hosted Connecticut author Deborah Freedman in a special author visit to (almost all) of our public school kindergarteners and each one went home with a signed copy of her sweet 2011 book, Blue Chicken! (If you haven't read this book yet, you can easily create a free account and read the online version at We Give Books ) How can you resist with this stunning cover?
This day was a true collaborative effort and it all started with a Early Childhood Reading Grant from Target to support more author visits at my library. If you haven't applied for a Target grant and you have a store in your area, you should definitely look into it this opportunity. It was my first grant attempt and I found it to be quick and easy, and all online.
Once we received the grant, I started to think about which author would be a good fit for our community. I had recently fell in love with the oh so charming Blue Chicken and was delighted to hear that the author was from our state. We truly are fortunate in Connecticut to have a group of talented authors who love to share books and their process for creating with kids. This project would never have happened to this scale without the early and ongoing support from Deborah Freedman! She was wonderful to work with and was as committed as I was to getting as many books into as many student's hands as possible.
Once we had the author and our book, I contacted the publisher to get a price on purchasing enough books for all of the kindergarteners in our public schools (which turned out to be close to 400 with both AM and PM classes!) Even with a substantial publisher discount for giveaway materials, we were still not quite there. I brainstormed with my colleagues and followed the good advice of reaching out to our district's superintendent. We are fortunate to have grown a positive relationship with our school district, so the superintendent was happy to collaborate on this event and support us in purchasing the remaining books.
Once we knew that we had the support to go forward, the next few weeks were a whirlwind of activity. We ordered all the books (which the author hand signed for each student) and placed bookplates in each copy, created activities to supplement the author presentation, and worked out the logistics of having 6 different schools with over 180 kindergartners arrive to our downtown library. Thankfully, the coordinator of the school media specialists arranged all the bus transportation and contacted the schools to arrange for permission slips. Even with a snag in logistics (the PM kinders couldn't get bused to the library), we quickly regrouped and decided we would travel to as many PM classes as possible. Throughout it all, library staff and volunteers worked diligently to organize the details of the day.
We learned some lessons along the way, but overall we are so proud of our efforts! With 392 kindergartners in our city, we were able to visit 346 students that day and deliver books to the remaining ones.
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