Book Trailers: Moving toward the Future of Digital Publishing

Have you ever seen a book trailer? Nowadays, the traditional book selling activities such as book talks in multiple cities are not very attractive. Instead, with the advances in technology and the belt-tightening economy, publishers and authors are actively looking for web alternatives to promote their books.

Especially in the world of children's literature, things are changing fast.

Award-winning storyteller Dianne de Las Casas has created a Ning community for sharing and discussing kidlit book trailers. Authors can post their trailers and other videos (such as activities with children during school visits). Bibliophiles can discover great reads by watching those videos.

Here’s a gorgeous one from the site: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by author/illustrator Grace Lin.

Teaching via Picture Books

I have been immersed in a big number of children’s picture books these days, which I feel supper happy about. To become a children’s book editor and writer is one of my career goals when I get back to China in the future, in addition to academic life. All the recommended picture books by different speakers are interesting in a special way. They offer various teaching points for classroom writing workshops.

This is a book I like very much which is fun to read and of multiple teaching points.

Teaching points:

1. Punctuation is the craft (e.g., …)
2. A sentence can be written across pages
3. Use speech bubble to add conversation
4. Use text in boldface and exclamation mark to express strong feelings
5. Write words into different shapes (to match pictures) (e.g., a curvy shape)
6. Use repetitive format
7. Dialogue can be added by people not shown in the picture
8. Use pictures to show emotions
9. …

Interesting Children's Picture Books

Wave: A wordless book
I have fallen in love with this book upon a first glance, as it was shown via a projector this afternoon. It is the first "silent" book I have ever known. It "tells" a story about a little girl walking, thinking, and feeling the waves at a beach. The book shows great closeness to nature, and presents a limpid and bright world, combined with reality and imagination, in the eyes of the little girl.

Walk on! A Guide to Taking the First Step: A humorous book
This is book of vivid pictures showing how babies learn to walk. It is a funny book to read and to be shown to younger students.

A Flavor of Teaching Strategies

Instructor: Celena Larkey, 10 am -12:00

After the keynote, we came back to TC to join a smaller group to focus on a specific grade. I chose to participate in “first-grade” group. Recalling my own writing experiences during all my formative years in China, I felt that the first grade was one of the two crucial moments in my life for learning writing: (1) the time when I began to learn to write as a first grader, and (2) the “bottleneck” period when I was full of emotions but lack of systematic techniques to write. The R&W approaches for first grade here will further illuminate the ways of English teaching for students in big cities in China who take English as a second language from kindergarten, and may also shed light on the approaches of teaching Chinese literacy. Though English and Chinese are two languages having extreme differences, I believe, the concept of being a writer, a fair number of teaching strategies and learning principles, can be shared and co-discussed.

*What is good writing?

The Best Story

Celena asked us what should be the good writing for our students. I wrote down the key words given by peers: confidence, connection, choice, relaxed environment, organized, etc. Before perceiving the answer at the end of this week (the end of the writing institute), I’d like to add more thoughts:

The joys of writing first come from choices. For younger children, especially those who just begin to write, it is not appropriate to give them many restrictions. Let’s forget about connection, paragraph, and grammar. Let’s just write for fun, for something they feel interested, meaningful, and/or something which can help them create a wonderland in their mind. Free writing gives more options for imagination and creativity.

Every child has a palette in his/her mind. They use a mind brush to paint on the palette. How can we as teachers add colors to the teaching of writing? It is our responsibility to elicit their imaginations and guide them to "paint" their beautiful images via texts, pictures, music, and/or other possible media formats.

* Teacher as adult writer

Celena also told us that we would spend about 40 minutes per day this week to practice adult’s writing, to experience ourselves as adult writers. I jotted down ideas for possible topics: my first successful writing experience, my grandma’s brave stories, a story for my beloved, a poem for an only child, etc. I finally decided to write about my grandma's brave expedition in the 1940s, which I will blog about in the later entries.

* The use of "timeline"

The “timeline” here as consulted with Celena is about mapping the ideas you want to use for writing. It can be about breaking up a big idea into small ideas, or selecting special moments within a small idea.