For those of you at Toronto’s 2006 Reading for the Love of It conference who missed the handouts, here are
Loris Lesynski’s Best Suggestions for Echo Reading

• Use story voice.

• Start with very small bits of repetition, not whole lines. Assume everyone is feeling a bit shy and unsure. Lead them into it step by step. When I am delighted by their reciting, I let it show. “Good! Okay—again.”

• One of the great advantages of echo reading is getting to express oneself without the fear of making a mistake. Nevertheless, when the whole group sounds lame, I’ll say “Well, that sounded crummy, let’s try it again.”
I have found that demanding better expression from the group peaks the kids’ interest considerably and immediately—they like the challenge. Ask the group to do a line again. “We can make that cooler, sharper.” You will find that a BIG improvement is immediate.

• If they aren’t picking up the hand cues, do a motion and say “This is a cue. Follow the cues.” In other words, be the conductor and treat the reciting as rehearsal.

• Select material with good rhythm, appropriate length. Choose poems that you yourself like, and ones you think your kids will like.

• Take advantage of one of your most powerful tools as a reciter: the pause.

• As they get the hang of this, the kids themselves can offer variations, sound effects, and their own rhythms. The group can test it. “Okay, let’s see if that works.” Kids can participate in improving the suggestion as they become more experienced.

• Try to keep the instructions also rhythmic, in story voice, and full of expression. This keeps the enthusiasm alive and the beat going.

• Let the students know that the most dramatic way to do a poem is go from complete silence to WHOOMP, begin the poem. (This is often more effective than just saying “Be quiet and listen.”)

• Have small groups of kids each pick a poem and choreograph it themselves. They can repeat or transplant lines or phrases…use props… make up their own motion sequences. I’ve seen teachers do this with groups of reading buddies, so half the kids are little and half older.

• Take a word and repeat it, with expression. Kids can take their own names and singsong them in repetition. If you’re feeling ambitious, have one child come up to the front and combine that repeated sound with a repetitive movement. Add another child. Soon you’ll have a huge weird engine with all the parts doing different things.

• Contrast in rhythm and sound make the reciting exciting. Slow and fast lines, loud and soft lines, sweet and monster voices. Keep the underlying grid of the rhythm in mind, so the beat feels right during silences or stretched-out sounds.

• Everybody likes sound effects. Clap, meow, bark, go SPLAT.

• Costumes and props can be used, but better yet: announce imaginary ones. “Imagine you’re all wearing armour.” “For this one, everyone’s a dog.”

• Write beats on the blackboard, DUM-da-da, for example, and leave space for kids to come up and write words with that same rhythm beneath it as they think of them. This needs to be something they can glance at and mull over through the day. For some people, beat and rhythm come naturally; others take quite a while to get it, but once they do, their love of language and reading will take quite a leap. DUM-da-da can be sandwiches, elephant, serious. DUM-da can be playground, money, teacher. How about da-DUM-da-da? — rhinoceros!

“English is a fascinating language. There is probably no other tongue in which there are more ways to say one thing.” Bill Moore, Words That Taste Good, Pembroke Publishers

“Interesting words don’t cost any more than dull ones.”
Jacqueline Jackson, children’s author

Worth reading once, twice, three times:
Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to our Children will Change their Lives Forever by Mem Fox

For your own enjoyment:
The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way Bill Bryson, Bard

Words That Taste Good Bill Moore, Pembroke Publishers

Great Web Information
Babies’ Hands Move to the Rhythm of Language

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-09/dc-bh083001.php

Rhythm and the Read-Aloud

http://www.bethanyroberts.

com/RhythmandtheReadaloud.htm

A Choral Speaking Teacher’s Guide

http://www.scriptsforschools.com/90.html

Hope everybody enjoyed Reading for the Love of It and all the terrific speakers. Talk to you again soon,
Loris

P.S. Click here to write to me any time.

I haven’t done a “What’s New” page for awhile cuz I’ve had one of those boring hacking coughing winter colds that wipe out one’s enthusiasm for just about everything.

I’ll make it up to you later this week, though, by doing an extensive entry on FAMILY READING NIGHT suggestions for your schools.

Teachers sometimes get sick, too. Here’s a picture I did of a teacher staying home for the day–it goes with the poem “What I’d Like to Know” in Nothing Beats A Pizza. He looks happy to be at home in bed with a good library book, his cat, and a cup of coca, don’t you think? What’s a little sneezing?

Talk to you again soon,
Loris

P.S. Write to me any time.

Inventing weird soup is as good a way as any to get back into THINKING after holiday time, like an appetizer before plunging into schoolwork, or a warm-up before running. Click on the little soup bowl on Pages to Color to print out a PDF of a BIG soup bowl that your kids can fill with drawings, words or collage. I’ve seen teachers tie Boy Soup in with creative writing, drawing, science, math and even some complicated graphs in the older grades.

(One school in the States made a bulletin-board-sized bowl of Teacher Soup, with little photos of all the staff members floating among peas and carrots!)

For some really interesting classroom activities from Boy Soup, go here.

Talk to you again soon,
Loris

P.S. E-mail me anytime.

It’s so amazing how Christmas is different and yet the same every year, that intertwining of what’s happening now in this very year and all the familiar rituals, beautiful music, same decorations from years and years before.
If you happen to pop in to visit this page today, best wishes for a lovely, loving season, with lots of hugs and cookies and twinkling and laughter. Speaking of laughter, get a load of this picture from the 50s of me with my younger sister Lena and a particularly sombre department store Santa:

All best,
Loris
P.S. I’m always glad to hear from you.

I just found a long list of title ideas I’d put together when doing the book which ended up as Ogre Fun.

The story is about ogres who catch yawning from some children—you know how contagious yawning is: when you see someone do it, it’s almost impossible to stop yourself from yawning right back. Even thinking about can be contagious.

These were some of the ideas I came up with:
Ogrewhelming
Ogre the Rainbow
Miss Ogre Regrets
Ogre O’s
Love You For Ogre

These cracked me up, a good laugh this morning! I bet a lot of authors have lists like these, both good, bad and impossible ideas scribbled down when they’re trying to come up with a book title.

USUALLY the idea for the title comes to me from the very start of the story. If that doesn’t happen, it can be very elusive and take a long, long time to find.

Here’s the Ogre Fun activities page. There are ogre beauty tips, drawing ideas, inquiries about yawning, and pictures of Gronny’s posse drawn by kids.

Here are some really good ogre stories:
Awful Ogre’s Awful Day
by Jack Prelutsky, illus. Paul O. Zelinsky Greenwillow 0688077781
Zeralda’s Ogre
by Tomi Ungerer Roberts Rinehart Publishers 1570982678
Ogre Eats Everything
by Bethany Roberts, illus. Marsha Winborn Dutton 0525472916

Talk to you again soon,
Loris

P.S. Any ideas of your own for an ogre story title? Let me know. More ogre beauty tips also welcome.

How big is the “original artwork” for a picturebook illustration?
Some of the illustrations in picture books are done on huge canvases, and then made much smaller to go onto the page. Some of the pictures are drawn and painted at exactly the same size they’ll end up in the final book.
I found this illustration I’d done for the first page of Night School. I was astonished at the size of it—I must have used a magnifying glass and my smallest paintbrush! I put the original illustration beside a quarter, so you can see how small it is.
It’s the second window on the first page of the story.
I think I also drew some micro cats on the rooftops, and two minuscule raccoons playing among the garbage cans.

I wonder what it would be like to work on an enormous illustration—one the size of a refrigerator, or a billboard—and then see it in a tiny book.

Click here for some very intriguing things to do with Night School.

Talk to you again soon,
Loris

P.S. Any questions about how illustrators work? Ask me anytime.

P.P.S. I just found this terrific website for kids and poetry, and
here’s another one. I THINK YOU’LL LOVE THEM!

Do space aliens have their own form of pizza? Obviously this was a question I asked myself when illustrating Nothing Beats A Pizza. (I found this picture this morning.) The ingredients for Martian Pizza would be weirdly interesting. And how would you deliver them in outer space?

Hey, maybe there’s even a PLANET Pizza out there, orbiting around the oven (the sun).

Click here for more things to do from Nothing Beats A Pizza. Hope you have fun with this.

Talk to you again soon,
Loris

P.S. I always enjoy hearing from you. Just click here.

Just got back from talking to K-3 teachers in Calgary. A warm, smart, hospitable bunch of people they were, and it was an excellent conference.

Officially it was a conference for the Early Childhood Education Council, which everyone there shortened to ECEC. It took me the whole four days to get it right—I kept saying Eee, eee, see, see, eee and variations thereof. In between giving my own presentations, I was able to attend some workshops. I chose the ones that were about the topic to be the basis of my next book of poems, and learned a lot from captivating speakers. (Can’t tell you yet what that topic is.)

And what comes after a trip, besides jet lag, unpacking, and a little laundry? Right, LETTERS! The grade threes at Grant MacEwan Elementary sent me a stack of delightful, well-written messages, with some drawings thrown in.

Below are letters from Ashley, Mahin and Paul. The illustration of me doing my Author Visit in front of the whole group is by Krishma.

The Pizza Man is by Klassen. I’ll have to add Aashna’s portrait of me (on the right) to the ones that other kids did —have a look, if you like. (I don’t know why children keep drawing me but I really like it.)

Firefly Books has packaged sets of my books for teachers, reading specialists, school librarians and others in the field, available at a 10% discount. You can get a PDF order form by clicking on the laughing teacher to the left. If you have a teacher at your school who looks like this, be sure to show him the picture.

Talk to you soon,
Loris

P.S. Always happy to hear from you. Just click here.

These colors in November… like spices, or old sweaters. I like them a lot. I actually like November a lot, too, if it’s not blowing at me or soaking me. Maybe I should take a camera out and soak up some of these soft calm colors. Or write a poem. I think a non-rhyming one. If you write one too, let me know.

Talk to you soon,
Loris
loris@lorislesynski.com

There is a great deal of interesting and really gripping children’s and Young Adult fiction about wartime. I picked this one up at Titles Bookstore’s Remembrance Day display.

The cover immediately made it known this was from another time (I personally remember those bathing caps), about a girl in her teens, how she’s looking out into the world, into the future. Now that’s a good cover. Not dry, not too earnest, and makes you ask questions.

I’m telling you about this because I thought it was such a good book. Bobby, the 15-year-old girl in Forget-Me-Not, is finding life both exciting and confusing at the end of World War II. There are troubling changes in the young men who have come back. Her awareness of what happened in the war develops slowly; her mother strongly discourages her from reading the newspaper. The writing takes you right into Bobby’s world and her observations.

I’ll have to have a look at author Barbara Haworth-Attard’s previous book, Theories of Relativity. It was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Oh, and the back cover says she has another one called Love-Lies-Bleeding, which Quill & Quire called “living history, richly detailed and enjoyable.” There’s nothing like discovering a new author!

P.S. Hmmm, let’s see if she has a website… aha, here it is and oh wow! she’s written all kinds of books that look very interesting! Lucky me. (Well…lucky all of us, really.) I’m off to find them.

Talk to you again soon,
Loris