I'm polishing my traveling goggles for my drive across the desert to Las Vegas to the annual ALA (American Library Association) conference. I'm going to be signing my book, The Kite That Bridged Two Nations: Homan Walsh and the First Niagara Suspension Bridge, at the Boyds Mills /Calkins Creek booth 567-569 on Sunday, June 29, 2014 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.  Stop by! I have a brand new bookmark to give you for all those books you'll be collecting over the weekend. I also have a limited number of posters with an Educator's Guide on the back to hand out to the first folks who pick up a copy of my book. Be sure to say hi to my hard-working editor, Carolyn Yoder, and the super energetic manager of marketing and permissions, Kerry McManus, while you're there.

How do you move kids from research to writing straight informational text to adding narrative devices to enrich their writing? That's what Kristen Nordstrom and I will be showing at the California Reading and Literature Project's Summer Literacy Workshop at California Lutheran University on June 19 (tomorrow!). We'll be doing some hands-on with participants and sharing strategies for the writing process and classroom management used with first graders. We'll also show the kids' final results. If this can be done in first grade, it can be done in any grade! Stay tuned for a follow-up on this pairing of a children's author with a classroom teacher.