Dragons Visit Portland!

Once again we travelled to the City of Roses, this time to visit two wonderful elementary schools and do author presentations.  The first school, Findley Elementary has a wonderfully diverse student population (over 30 languages!) and dragons for a mascot!  So the Findley dragons welcomed the Shi Shi dragons and were thrilled to find real live Northwest dragon cousins.  I did presentations to classes from kindergarten to 5th grade and had a great time.  And a special part for me was signing and selling 120 books!

From Findley I went to Chapman Elementary School (home of the Chapman swifts – birds that roost in their chimney during their fall migration season) where some friends children go to school.  A vibrant school in a classic old school building with lots going on.  This was my first presentation in a big auditorium, with the slides being on a huge screen behind me!  The kids were excited to see the painting demonstrations and clapped and cheered as each image became a recognizable animal or scene.  Another big thrill for me!  The dragons really caught on with the second graders here and one mom said to me, “We bought your book yesterday and my son didn’t want to do anything else except read the book when we got home.  We finished the first 3 chapters last night and he loves it!”

Another fun event at Chapman was doing haiga (combined haiku and paintings) with the 4th grade.  The students had written haiku the week before and I chose 3 poems from each class to illustrate while they watched and I explained the principles of haiga to them.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures but you can imagine the thrill the students experienced when I picked one of their poems or incorporated one of their ideas into a painting.  At one point I made a mistake with some red paint and a boy suggested, “You could turn that into the dragon’s ball of fire.”  And so I did and he then remarked to the librarian, “She took my idea – I can’t believe she took my idea!”  It’s very rewarding to impact children’s lives in these small ways.