BC Book Prize, Bayside and Beyond

Well, a lot of good news to report! Last week I found out that Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom had been nominated for a 2011 Saskatchewan Young Readers' Choice Award (the Shining Willow). Then, yesterday evening, the phone rang. I assumed it was a telemarketer - it was just around the time they like to start to call. But no - it was a lovely woman calling to inform me that George has been nominated for a BC Book Prize! It's the Sheila Egoff award. Fingers crossed for George. And actually, while I'm tooting George's horn, I don't think I mentioned that it's also shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association's Children's Book of the Year!

Okay, okay, enough bragging. My real reason for posting today is to give a shout-out to an amazing school I visited last week, Bayside Middle School in Brentwood Bay on Vancouver Island. Their librarian, Vivian Hicks, is awesome. I wish I had a picture of her. This gal somehow managed to get the entire school to read Word Nerd. Most of the classes had it as a read-aloud, so the teachers were also game, and read the book to their students, "naughty bits" and all.

I did six presentations to about 100 kids each.

Here is one of my group of five volunteers, acting out a scene from Word Nerd.

And another. (You can see I'm having at least as much fun as the kids).

And this was my all-girl cast playing all-boy characters. One of them even came prepared with an Ambrose-like toque! They were fantastic.

This school was really great. I was there for two days, and even taught a writing workshop to a group of aspiring writers. I really enjoyed this (I hope they did, too - it's the first one I've ever taught). Not only did the librarian (the aforementioned Vivian) get the whole school reading the book, other teachers did other thematically-related projects. The art teacher got students to do these beautiful clay "Scrabble" boards:

And another teacher started a new intramural Scrabble tournament!!

Thanks so much for making me feel so welcome.