My web design firm, Waxcreative Design, knows how to get authors noticed.
In addition to great aesthetics, they are expert at branding, marketing, and promotion. They are also good people. I am honored this Holiday Season to be featured on their New Year’s card.
About 100 school sessions ago, Continue reading “Celebrating the Holidays and Rewriting”
Every author visit I make to schools around the country is different. 
Schools have distinct personalities, and my presentation is redirected by local influences. One school might put up posters and have a Cheesie Mack Day. Another might get me interviewed by the local newspaper. But for every school, in this time of tight budgets and difficult curricular challenges, my visit is always a big deal…and I am greeted with great excitement.
Some things—no matter which school—are universal.
When Cheesie comes to school, the students are enthusiastic. Their intellectual curiosity is engaged and stimulated. And their laughter is large, spontaneous, and joyful.
And then there’s the nearly obligatory mac ‘n’ cheese luncheon. The kids love it, and I love their gusto.
I often ask for a salad.
How do you get kids excited about reading?
My answer is to show them how reading a good book is an adventure in itself. I get them to ask themselves questions. Questions like: Who are these characters? Why did the plot take that turn? How did the author create this mood?
I call it being a reading detective.
And in that spirit, my school presentations consist of lots of questions. Using my middle grades novel, Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything, first in a series from Random House, I engage students, exhorting them to become reading detectives.
Here’s a short video that captures Continue reading “Cheesie Mack and the Reading Detectives”
I was in Southern California all last week hopping from bookstores to schools in an exhausting and exhilarating schedule of 22 Cheesie Mack book events and two Pobba concerts. All were fun and rewarding, but one visit, a spur-of-the-moment trip back in time, stood out.
In September 1952, Oxnard’s Kamala School (K-6) opened to students. I was one of those students, a fourth grader, full of energy.
Almost 59 years older, also full of energy, I returned to Kamala School Continue reading “A Return to Kamala School”
![SNAP-SPELLING-F[1]](http://stevecotler.com/tales/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SNAP-SPELLING-F1.jpg)
Little Johnny can read well long before he can spell well. Should you be worried? Should you send him to a tutor?
Problem-solving technique can be deductive/analytical or inductive/synthetic. Stated another way, an approach can be convergent or divergent.
For every youngster striving for literacy, learning to read and spell requires both convergent and divergent Continue reading “A Siyuntist’s Perspective”
Recently, NewSouth Books announced the publication of a new version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Bowdlerized by Auburn University’s Dr. Alan Gribben, Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, is described by NewSouth thusly:
In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain’s most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author originally envisioned. More controversial will be the decision by the editor, noted Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, to eliminate the pejorative racial labels that Twain employed in his effort to write realistically about social attitudes of the 1840s.
Not surprisingly, Professor Gribben’s decision to replace the word nigger with slave has engendered controversy.