Online Author Visit 2021: When Students Write Back To Me

I am glad when I get feedback from children and young people. This group of readers are the people I write for. Their comments, questions and replies to my books or author visit sessions affirm the work I do and inspire me to improve and to continue writing. 

In a recent online Author Visit at the De La Salle Zobel Learning Resource Center, I designed the online experience consisting of a priming activity, an input session that is 15-20  mins long and a post activity. The priming activity is the introduction to the session and it is aimed to prepare listeners or participants to the session. I use the theme, main concept and skill as anchors of my activities. For this Author Visit, I used Character and Character Development as theme and skill. I worked around the concepts of story as windows, mirrors and doors. 

Have a look at the infographic and the questions I asked to prepare the child audience by following the link. The video for the input session is up on the Librarians Tambayan channel on YouTube. 

Included on the video are activities that students can do asynchronously. Imagine my surprise when the librarian sent works of students a few days after she presented my video through the library's web portal! I also received emails from students. I replied to them, of course! 

One student asked me for writing tips and how he can improve his story map.

Thank you for doing the activity :-) !

You followed the instructions and did more - you wrote a story! The next step is to clean and polish what you made. Here are my suggestions:

1. Keep your sentences simple. Go back to the story and identify sentences that need to be changed. Remember, a sentence expresses an idea. 

2. Try putting in dialogues between and among characters. What conversations did the family have about going to Baguio? What did they feel about Cara the dog being hurt? What did the vet tell them about taking care of Cara's wound? How did they all feel about adopting a pet in the end? 

3. Make sure that the images you picked for the story are good for sharing to others. Your librarian can help you establish this. Send your librarian a message.

I would be interested to see improvements on your story. Good job!

The librarian shared the students' works with me. I will be sharing some of them in the blog with permission from the students and their parent/guardian.