Illustrator Visit

Our school had a visitor this week - illustrator Michael White. He is a local Atlanta illustrator and has illustrated a few children's books, most notably The Library Dragon by Carmen Deedy!

Our PTA sponsored him and he visited with every child in our school (no easy feat when you have 1100 students!)

He does a FABULOUS job with the kids and he has the kids bring in paper and pencil so they can draw along with him. He left us with more than 40 of the illustrations that he did during his three days here - we will frame some for the media center and the PTA will be auctioning off some more to raise funds so we can have more visits like this. Here is one he did on Tuesday, which happened to be our 100th day of school.

I think author and illustrator visits are great for the kids and I think they get so much out of them. I also think that not all illustrators and authors are natural born speakers to children and I have witnessed some truly dreadful author presentations, that is why when I have a good one I like to give the person a shout out - I never invite/hire an author or illustrator unless I have seen them myself or have had some good reviews of the person. For all you media specialists out there, Michael is a great one!

Check out more of his work and info on author visits at his web site.