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As mentioned on Friday, Albert Whitman author Suzanne Slade took Read Across America Day quite literally. Here are her experiences with 13 Skype visits in one day:

The Day I Read Across America (tales from the virtual author visit front)

On Read-Across-America Day, March 2nd, I woke at 3:35 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was too excited! I was going to read to students across the country—in CA, IL, GA, IN, PA, NH, OH, FL, AL, NC, OR, NY and NJ—all in one day! It was a reading event I’d been working on for over a year. With the help of Skype, I would visit thirteen different schools from the comfort of my home office (aka. dining room) in Libertyville, Illinois. If all went according to plan, I would connect with a different school every half hour, beginning at 8 am and running straight through until 2:30 pm, spending twenty minutes with each group of children. As I put on my striped Cat-in-the-Hat hat that morning, I wondered what fun surprises, or technical glitches, awaited me. And here’s how it went down.

The day kicked off with 118 enthusiastic fifth graders from Eaton Elementary in NC. As with all the schools I would visit, they had prepared a message for me to share with the next school. Eaton’s message was, “Get off the couch and read!” How awesome is that? Before our visit ended, I asked the class how many people they thought I would talk to during the day, as the school with the closest guess would win a free box of autographed books from me. The fifth graders had used their estimation skills and come up with a guess of 1400. I have to admit, I was a little surprised their number was so high. I’d guessed only 375.

My next stop was King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida where I met children in kindergarten through second grade. I explained how a book is made using some cool show-and-tells from my newest picture book, Climbing Lincoln’s Steps (illustrated by Colin Bootman). I showed them my original 5-page manuscript, the 32-page book dummy my editor had put together, Colin’s early pencil sketches, copies of his amazing full-color paintings, the F & G (folds and gathers), and the beautiful finished book complete with dust jacket. The students had lots of interesting questions. My favorite was, “Do you have to change the words in your stories a lot?” We ended our time by reading one of my picture books together. The morning was rolling along without a hitch, although I must admit only one hour into my marathon reading event I realized I couldn’t stay sitting all day, so I put my computer on a small chair on top of my table and did the next few visits standing up. 

The third school in the Bronx, New York was a del