VIRTUAL SCHOOL VISIT at Ladera Stars Academy, Thousand Oaks, CA

Last Friday I had an enjoyable visit online with Julie Nerland’s kindergarten class at Ladera Stars Academy in Thousand Oaks, California. The kids were very enthusiastic and very responsive. Julie and I struggled a bit with the technology (she never figured out how to get her camera to work so I never got to see the children) but the important part was that the kids could see me and I could hear them. I learned that they recently hatched chicken eggs in their classroom and would soon be adding the chicks to the school flock. Every day children at the school feed the chickens and collect eggs. Because of the kindergarteners’ interest in chickens I focused my presentation mainly on my book HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6 and other books about birds. (We discussed that chickens are birds, and like all birds, chickens lay eggs and have feathers.) I also shared my book A ZEBRA’S WORLD and showed them how they can make their own cut paper art using the downloadableinstructions at my website. We finished by singing the Wiggle and Waggle song, which I acted out with my sock puppets.

I thank Kristen Bott Nordstrom for making my visit possible and for arranging the details. She purchased the author visit for her school at a fund raiser for victims of the recent terrible fires in Los Angeles and Altadena. I was happy to contribute the author visit to the cause.

Note: I am accustomed to using Zoom for virtual author visits to schools. However, this school no longer has Zoom available on their school computers, so we were using GoogleMeets, a platform that neither the teachers nor I had much familiarity with. We made it work but it would have been better if the classroom camera had been connected. Next time!