A graphs fan

This letter certainly made my day:

Dear Loreen Leedy,

I love the Book of the Great Graph Contest. I like the Graphs and the “Whose foot is the longest”! I Love the cookies and the Pictures by you too. Here are some Graphs I Liked: Where My Friends Live, and Do You Like Mud?

Love,

Shayna

Isn’t that fun...and so nice that it’s a math book that inspired Shayna’s enthusiasm. I have to say that the bar graph made of cookies is one of my favorites, too. Here is a link to The Great Graph Contest.

Can books play games?

I’ve been enjoying reading a book about video, computer, and alternate reality gaming called Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. I saw her by chance on a segment of a show that plays with the notion of what is news, The Colbert Report (you have to watch a silly ad first, sorry):

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jane McGonigal
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

There are many concepts she discusses that could be incorporated directly into a book or story app or be a part of the extended world around one (e.g. via an author’s web site). My monthly post on I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids) goes into more detail about it: Playing games with information.

A few of the interactive, gamelike ideas that would be fun to add to my books include: 
Layered images so readers could see under the surface of something
Changing images to show sequence over time (e.g. metamorphosis)
Non-linear paths through a book
Interactive timeline with pop-up elements
Pop-up word definitions
Audio feedback to let readers know they’ve found right answer, etc.


I would love to hear how authors or educators are tapping into the techniques of game design to engage readers, please let me know of any cool ideas.

A Measuring Penny story

Dear Loreen,

Two days ago my husband and I were walking our Boston terrier, Stellaluna, in the Dallas City Park. Dallas is a small town in northern Oregon near Salem.

During this walk a small boy and his mother approached us.  The young boy came right to me and said...“are you the lady who wrote Measuring Penny?”  

I replied “No.” His mother then explained that you had written the book and he was very impressed with it. He thought I might be that lady.

After hearing about the book, I told the young man that I would like to read it. I went to the library the next day and got a copy.  I found your book delightful and educational.  A “Delightful Book”, indeed!

I explained to the little boy that our dog was named Stellaluna and asked if they were familiar with the story Stellaluna. They were.

It was a wonderful experience for us. I thought you might like to know how your book continues to please young people.

Warmest Personal Regards,

Beverly H. Kentch, Kindergarten Teacher (retired)

Post Scriptum:

Notice that Stellaluna's Ears are greater than 1 cotton swab long!!

Isn’t that a charming story and letter? I asked Beverly’s permission to post it here, many thanks to her. She’s right, Stellaluna’s ears are quite magnificent. (In the book, Penny’s ears are measured against a cotton swab). I also must mention that seeing Post Scriptum written out is a rare sight, love it!

How Andy Went to Mars

Today’s post is in celebration of Share a Story ~ Shape a Future week. For more links to similar posts, please visit Elizabeth O. Dulemba’s blog.







Once upon a time, 
there was a little boy in the 4th grade who had loads of fun at school every day. He loved to sit in the last row of the classroom making his friends giggle and folding paper airplanes. Andy was reading well below grade level, but he thought:

One day his mom gave him four quarters for book club day. On the way to school, he saw a pretzel vendor and bought one. Mmmm…Andy loved pretzels!

After polishing off the salty snack, Andy sat at his desk studying the order form. With 50¢ left, he searched for a book that was cheap enough. A book called Mission to Mars looked okay and cost 49¢, so he ordered it. Then he folded a paper airplane and aimed it at a kid in the front of the room. The boys in the back row giggled as usual.

A week or two later, the brand new book arrived. The story was about a family that moved to a Mars colony (wow!) The two children played hooky from school, snuck outside and got lost, wandered into a cave, and then met some (previously unknown) native Martians!

Andy was amazed at how much fun a book could be and that it could bring a story to life in his mind. When that adventure was over, he had to have more. Books, books, books, he wanted to read more books. After a few months, Andy was reading at 6th grade level. He went on to attend collage, then graduate school, and earned his Ph.D.

Nowadays, Andy is a research scientist whose lab is at the Kennedy Space Center. He investigates a variety of topics in astrobiology, which is: the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. (Quote is from NASA.) He even has a Mars chamber in his lab that simulates the conditions on the Red Planet.

After Andy and I met and eventually married, one topic that often came up was “Why don’t we do a book together?” and “...about what?” One day the obvious solution occurred to us…Andy began downloading incredibly detailed NASA photographs taken on Mars and I started drawing characters to populate the barren landscape. The end result was our picture book Messages from Mars:

The story takes place one hundred years in the future and stars a group of students that get to visit Mars. They explore the historic sites of the Viking, Pathfinder, and Spirit and Opportunity missions, and fly over many of the planet’s spectacular features such as the largest volcano in the solar system and a canyon as long as the United States is wide.

So, because Andy read a book in the 4th grade that captured his imagination, not only did he get to go to Mars, so did I! You never know which book a child will fall in love with so it only makes sense to keep offering kids as many diverse options as there are stars in the sky.

Happy Reading!

A “highly recommended” review (yay!)

My Teacher Is a Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Poems, Jokes, Riddles and Amazing Facts. Loreen Leedy (Author and Illustrator), Marshall Cavendish, 48pp, $17.99, 2010, ISBN 97807614557084.
 
Gr 3-5–Fascinating facts and entertaining illustrations combine to make this trip through prehistory a fun adventure for all. The author not only includes fun facts about the earth’s formation and its first inhabitants, but also incorporates some of this information in the format of a poem and/or riddle within each spread, making it all the more eye-catching and memorable for young readers. The layouts are artistically appealing, and the placement of the animals and their related facts within each period gives the reader a better understanding of how life forms have evolved. Science teachers and school librarians will want to have this in their collection, not only because of the educational value of the information, but also because of its unique presentation of facts and the graphic illustrations and simple depictions of various life forms through the ages. Teachers can use this to show how poetry can be used across the curriculum. One of the most important features of this book is the inclusion of the fun-factor, but they will also seek it out as a resource for various areas of study.  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Library Media Connection 
Jan/Feb 2011

Click for the book’s page on my web site.

Click for a sliding puzzle of an archaeopteryx.

A flip-book preview of My Teacher is a Dinosaur

Originally I created this to go on my web site, on this page. A little flip-book is a really great way to let people browse inside your book, and you can choose which pages to include. Click on the right corner below to see it in action. [Update: if you’re reading this in Google Reader or similar RSS reader and don’t see a little book with flippable pages, please click on the post title and visit the blog to see how the flip-book works.)

So, how did I do this, you’re wondering? The book is laid out in InDesign CS4 and here are the steps:

To add the page curl to all pages, in the menu bar choose Window> Interactive> Page Transitions, and a little palette will open up.

From the drop down menu, choose Page Turn.

Click on the little symbol on the lower right to apply the effect to all pages.

In CS4 you can’t preview it (might be different in CS5.)

Now it’s time to export it. Choose File> Export, type in a name for the flip-book, select the SWF format and a destination for the Flash file and hit Save. Next the Export dialog box comes up:

I chose a 50% scale to reduce the size of the book, but other sizes will work so experiment. I wanted only a few pages, not the whole book, so Range is checked with the page numbers filled in. These were also checked: Spreads; Rasterize Pages; Generate HTML File; View SWF after Exporting (I’m not sure whether these all need be checked, really.) Be sure to check Include Page Transistions and Interactive Page Curl, obviously! The JPEG quality seems okay at Medium. If View SWF is checked, at least on my system it automatically opened in my web browser, Firefox. There you can play with the page turns and make sure the flip-book is working right.

One little wrinkle is that this book has some white pages, and on top of a white web page, it’s impossible to tell where the page corner is (to activate the page flip.) So, before exporting it from InDesign, I added a light gray rectangular border to the pages 12-19 (visible in screenshot) so the corner would be visible against white. You may wonder why I didn’t export starting with page 12? If you do that, it exports the entire previous 2 pages, also.

If you don’t typeset your own books (not many illustrators, do) it should be easy for the publisher to provide a SWF file, assuming they use InDesign.

Then, how to get it on a web page? Naturally, that varies with the software used. In Dreamweaver, the SWF file is copied into the root file of the site. Then on the web page, draw an AP DIV box, and under file menu choose Insert> Media> SWF. Then, because the page flip extends outside of the dimensions of the book, I added about 60 pixels to the height of the bounding box. The flip-book will still work if you don’t do that, the animated pages will just be a little cut off.


How did I get it onto this blog? Blogger won’t accept Flash directly, so the file has to be somewhere else (in my case, it’s on my web site.) In Blogger, I pasted this HTML code into the Edit HTML tab:
<embed height="420" pluginspage=" http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://www.loreenleedy.com/Dino.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="576"></embed>

You would have to replace my web URL and SWF file name with your own. Your Height and Width values probably will be different, too. This flip-book might be a little too big for my Blogger layout, but it’s perfect for my web site, so I left it as is. Hope the page turns work here on the blog, I’ll find out after this post is published!

My first ebook (sort of)

In the last couple of years the discussion about digital books and story apps in the publishing world has been steadily increasing. It has seemed to escalate in the last few months...there are conferences, workshops, seminars, articles, you name it. 

A group of authors including me had been talking about it privately on a listserv for a few months, then couldn’t resist it any longer and started a group blog called E is for Book. In less than a month we’ve had over 1,500 visitors which indicates there are many people who want to figure out how ebooks will affect the world of children’s books. The first post on the blog gives a good sense of the variety of topics we have been and will be talking about, including ereading devices, software for creating ebooks and apps, glimpses behind the scenes of making a particular title, and much more.

One of the simplest types of digital book is a straightforward conversion of the print book into a digital format without adding additional interactivity or sound. This has been available for a long time, in the form of PDFs. The question is how to get them out into the marketplace. In talking with my publishers, one of the venues they’re working with is Follett Library Resources, which has an ebook section. I don’t have the technical specs yet, but apparently they are using the PDF format. So, since I do the InDesign layouts for my books anyway, it was very easy to add the jacket front and back as single pages, add “endpapers” to page 1 and page 32, and output a PDF. This is just a sample for the publisher and I to discuss, not anything final. But, it is exciting to be moving in this direction, because it will make books more accessible for schools that prefer digital technology for whatever reason.