Jacqueline Davies Visits Lower School

Jacqueline Davies, the author of many published books including The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon and The Lemonade Wars series, visited Lower School on Friday, December 4th. Jackie presented a program called Sounds All Around to our kindergarten students and then again to our first grade students.  The children were transfixed as she shared techniques to listen to the sounds of words and to then include that descriptive language in their writing. As they listened to her read her own writing and poetry from her favorite poets, they used movement and signs to show whether words were soft or hard and identified exciting sounds. As they exited the library at the end of the program, each child beat a sound on the drum.

Our second and current third grade students had all read her book The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon during their bird study in second grade. Jackie shared the process she used in writing the book, fascinating facts she learned during her research about the life of John James Audubon and about birds. Our students loved the opportunity to measure using their own bodies the largest nest ever discovered. They all guessed the bird correctly- the bald eagle.

Fourth grade students experienced Jackie's program A Writer's Life.  She shared how she wrote books starting in elementary school and always knew she wanted to be a writer. She then lost confidence in college when faced with so many talented writers in her program. After traveling and working in various jobs for a couple of years after college, she realized that she did want to be a writer and spent the next several years writing books and submitting them for publishing. Even though it took a number of years for her first book to be published she never again lost confidence about being a writer. This was such a great message for our fourth grade students.

Jackie was impressed with the writing and art work she saw on the walls of our school. She even took a picture of second grade paintings of birds to keep for inspiration.