Tag: frog

A week of school talks at AISS.

by Catherine Carvell, posted in Book Stuff, School Talks

This week I spent my time at the Australian International School in Singapore giving author talks to the year 3, 4 and 5s.

display 1
The fantastic display by the librarian team. And yes, that is an origami frog on my head.

It was fantastic fun. The kids were enthusiastic, full of questions and it was great to meet so many passionate readers.

ais talk
The kids from AIS were thoughtful, imaginative and clever. The majority loved funny stories with conflict, suspense and adventure, while far less were keen on romance.

I owe a HUGE thanks to Jo-Anne Ward and her upper elementary library team. They not only created a wonderful author display, origami frog activities and a never ending stream of colouring-in sheets, but they also organised a fan-froggy-tastic lunchtime celebration and kept 750 kids running to schedule over 5 days, 15 talks and a hopping good lunchtime book launch.

By far, the most popular part of the talks was the character development exercise. We used one of Michael Scott Parkinson’s amazing frog drawings as inspiration and came up with some truly frog-tastical ideas.

stylish frog

all of us
My good friends and fellow authors Sarah Mousey and David Seow were there for moral support and my Singapore distributors Denise and Kelvin from Closetful of Books did an amazing job coordinating the sales.

Here are a few of my favourites.

Hip, the 58 year old street dancer who does beat boxing in his spare time and has a pet gorilla.

Swaggy, the 900 year old model-frog who likes to play it cool and has a pet fish.

Roger Flipperson, the 39 yr old Jumpsuit designer who races F1 cars in his spare time and owns a pet pig named Oinkus Maximus.

Bob Stewy Steve the Jaz teacher who likes to eat donuts.

And …

Smooth, the gangster frog who has a pet tiger and beats people up for fun – yikes!

And after the fun, we all agreed. The best things about being an author is creating interesting characters and making them do funny things – like forget to wear pants!

We also had LOADS of FANTASTIC entries to our very popular colouring-in competition. The artworks are currently being collated and will be judged over the weekend. All the entries are wonderful and I’m not sure how we will pick, but the best 10 entries will be featured here, on the FROG BLOG, Monday 24th March.

And finally, if you live in Singapore and haven’t got a copy of the  book yet, you just need to email Denise at;denise@closetfulofbooks.com