Well, I’m now at the California Kindergarten Association Conference, and I am so excited to present this afternoon! I flew in from Dallas last night, arriving just in time to catch a glimpse of their wonderful art children’s art display. I sent in two art projects that I saved from my class last year, and here they are:
I had a wonderful day meeting with the teachers at the Lamb of God Preschool on Friday, who are just about the nicest group of teachers I have ever worked with! If any of you got a better picture than the one I got below, please send it to me! Mine didn’t focus very well.
Then I had a quick flight out of town into the San Fransisco International Airport. Whew! Busy, busy, busy! But not too busy to tell you about some things that are happening this week!
First of all, our new website has my first full color story book on it, called Alphabet Action! I can’t tell you how excited I am to finally have this accomplished! Some of you may remember seeing me post a little about this process on my HeidiSongs Facebook page. Having never published a story book before, it was an interesting process for me to go through. Luckily for me, my husband used to work in the publishing business, (though he was creating catalogs and other products, not little books), so he is knowledgeable about how to go about this sort of thing.
As you might guess from the title, my book is based on the song, Alphabet Action, that can be found on the Singable Songs for Letters and Sounds CD and DVD, Letters & Sounds DVD, and also as a “Bonus Track” on my Musical Math CD and DVD. My husband found a wonderful illustrator to work with named Amanda Sorensen, came up with a contract, and together we generated ideas of what each page might look like. These ideas were emailed to Amanda, who then sketched out a couple of ideas for each page and emailed them to us for approval and to make a choice between one or another before proceeding. When we had a concept for each page that we all were happy with, she then completed the page and sent it back again for approval.
Last fall, I posted some pictures on my Facebook page of the proofs that the printer ran for us (larger than posters!) These showed multiple pages on a couple of very large sheets of paper, and were given to us by the printer for our approval, of course. After we were (very) sure that there were no mistakes in the book at all, we gave the thumbs up for printing! When the books were finally printed and we received the first box full, it was SO exciting to see a full color book with my picture on the back of it, and my name on the front as the author! It feels just GREAT!
So I took the book to school last fall, and read it to my kids. They were just thrilled to see my picture on the back, and they loved to read the story! It makes a really wonderful listening center to use with the CD! We also sang it and read it along as a class while we danced along with the CD, too. It’s now in our classroom book center, but I’m planning on getting it out again this spring when the children do a little bit more with publishing their own little books. I was thinking of printing out some extra little pictures of the children, sitting at tables and getting ready to write with a pencil, etc. Then we could glue their own “author pictures” on their books, too! I think that it would be extra meaningful for them, considering that they have all seen my picture on the back of the Alphabet Action book now, too! And now here is another story that I have written for you to try out in your classroom, if you like!
