ELA Lesson Plans: Online sources

Welcome to the Authors Who Skype with Classes & Book Clubs List!  I’m Kate Messner, the children’s author and educator who maintains this site.  I started it because I’ve found that virtual author visits are a great way to connect authors and readers, and I realize that many schools facing budget troubles don’t have the option of paid author visits. With that in mind, this is a list of authors who offer free 20-minute Q and A sessions with classes and book clubs that have finished reading one of their books. As an author, I offer free Skype chats for the following titles:

The image projected on the screen in the front of the classroom is Magritte's painting of a pipe, including the words, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." (1) I ask the students to each briefly make a guess why they think Magritte wrote that, since the painting is obviously a pipe. Some volunteers share their guesses with the class. One student nails it. "It's not a pipe; it's a drawing of a pipe!"

Given that Twitter limits all content to just 140 characters, how could anyone write a meaningful narrative, much less an interactive one? That was the challenge.

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Create Mood in Writing Using Digital Photos

Dystopian literature – fiction that imagines flawed societies typically under strict control of a self-serving entity, whether that's a government, corporation or unknown Wizard-of-Oz-like figurehead – helps young adults to become more shrewdly analytical of the societies that they exist in.

Those are my credentials. So here it is, my Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide to Knitting Your Own Female Hero.