GT President's Scholarship Weekend

  President’s Scholarship Weekend – 0 Hours

Playing With Technology

            Today I converted all of my ideas on paper to the computer. I created a storyboard on Pages by making small boxes to represent each page of the book. In each box, I typed the featured letter in the corner and wrote out my small blurb for the letter. I also wrote a bulleted list of illustration ideas in each box so that I could refer to them in the future when I start creating my illustrations. I really liked this part of the project because I could finally see my ideas coming together to form the story. Looking at the different boxes together, I could easily decide which words should go under broader categories. For example, I decided that I could talk about the hammocks under the “Gazebo” page because the illustration I plan to use will have the hammocks in it. I feel so much better after creating this online layout because it allows me to see how much work I am going to need to do for each page in the next few weeks. I can also see how many pages my book will approximately be (e.g. how much my book will cost to publish).

            The most fun part of today was starting to play with the Blurb software! In eighth grade, I wrote a children’s book with Charlotte Lee. We used Blurb to publish the book and were incredibly happy with the results. Blurb is a really cool program because it enables the user to have lots of flexibility with the page layouts. For my book, I hoped to have text overlapping the illustrations. However, once I started to really play with the program, I realized that it was very difficult to see the text over the illustrations. Although I really like the flexibility of Blurb’s software, it would be even better if users could create shapes where text could be seen over images (much like in Pages). After realizing how difficult it would be to have all of my text overlap illustrations, I decided to choose a layout where the text resides below the images. This will allow me to use different colors and fonts for the text.

Writing, Writing, and More Writing

            Since I will be out of school on Friday, I decided that I would work today on my project instead. After thinking about my writing strategy last night, I decided that it would be best for me to write an “A-Z” book about Siempre Verde. Although the book might not be an action-packed thriller, it would be the best way to organize all of the different things that I love about Siempre Verde. I started the writing process by listing out all of the different words I could think of when I thought about Siempre Verde – Arriba trail, hot springs, hammocks, Intag, etc. Then, I organized them in a list and looked at the letters where I had multiple items listed. For example, in my list for “S,” I had Santa Rosa, Siempre Verde, soccer, sugar cane, and Spanish in the same category. I tried to combine ideas where I might be able to overlap information. For example, I moved soccer to my category for the kids at the school because we play games with them whenever we visit.

            Though my list was pretty rough up to this point, I started to write commentaries for each of the letters to serve as the text for each of the pages. I wrote multiple commentaries for letters where I had more than one word to see which idea I liked explaining better. For example, I started writing about exclusively birds in the “B” category and decided that it might be better to put all animals and plants together in a flora/fauna category of “F.” I cranked out the first 10 letters pretty easily during my first hour of sit down work. After lunch, I spent two extra hours working on the last 17 letters and a few pages with extra information about Siempre Verde. I was surprised by how quickly I wrote a rough draft for these pages. However, after a brief read through, I knew that these pages would need A LOT of work in the coming days. I also needed to decide which words to focus on in the story and which words to leave out, or perhaps add to similar categories. Overall, I had an incredibly productive day today and cannot wait to show my work to my project advisors tomorrow!

Once Upon a Time...

            In order to start thinking about the story of my book, I had to research the history of Lovett’s involvement with Siempre Verde. In 1990, Bob Braddy, a Lovett science teacher, and his wife, Connie, traveled to Ecuador to study cloud forest ecology. While traveling through the Andean cloud forests, they came across a town called Santa Rosa. In the village, they found the local school in desperate need of repair. Coming home from their trip in Ecuador, Bob and Connie Braddy worked tirelessly to raise funds to rebuild the school. After helping the cloud forest community through the financial support of the school, Lovett purchased several hundred acres of primary cloud forest to create a protected preserve and establish a research center focused on conservation education. Reading through the history of this special place, I decided that I definitely want to include this history in my story. Since Bob Braddy played such an integral role in the establishment of Siempre Verde, I plan on portraying his character in my story. I also read a plethora of articles about Siempre Verde online and learned more about past students who visited the station.

            After my AP Physics C class, I sat down with pencil and started trying to get my ideas for the story on paper. I thought about all of the characters that I want to be in my book – Bob Braddy, Mr. Reynolds, Nelson and Mari, Dean, students, etc. I also toyed with the idea of having one main character to “lead” the reader around the station to show them the full “Siempre Verde experience.” If I wrote this type of a story, I would probably make my main character Nelson since he really runs the show at Siempre Verde. Although I spent a lot of time trying to come up with characters for the book, I spent the bulk of my time coming up with the overall storyline. I am finding that it is incredibly difficult to write a nonfiction children’s book that can both inform and captivate the reader. I am stuck between two storylines that I feel could work effectively to achieve both of these goals. First, I could write a story from the perspective of Nelson and show him leading a group of students around the lodge. This would probably be a more interesting story since I could make it more of a narrative rather than a fact book. Second, I could write an “A-Z” book for Siempre Verde and include all of the different things that have made my Siempre Verde experience so memorable. I am going to have a tough decision coming ahead!

Wait, How Do You Write a Children's Book?

            Today marks the beginning of the senior projects! I am so excited to start this process and begin working on writing my children’s book. At around ten o’clock this morning, I went to the DeKalb County Public Library to look at different types of children’s books. Before starting this process, I never realized that there was such a wide genre of children’s books! There were picture books, picture storybooks, fairy tales, historical fiction books, poetry books, and many other types. I want my story to be a nonfiction book about Siempre Verde; so, I checked out some of the few nonfiction picture books that I could find. I really liked Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney. The book talked about the complex issues behind Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in from the 1960s. I especially liked how the language was incredibly simple to understand (which made the racial issues easier to understand for a younger audience). While at the library, I also looked at some of my old favorite books to remind myself what I liked about them.

            After looking at books at the library and taking a quick trip to Barnes and Noble, I started my online research where I checked out various children’s book author blogs. One blog (KidLit) delved into the issues of rhyming in children’s literature today. Unfortunately, many authors feel like it is not important to establish an overall rhythm of the poem when using rhyming couplets. The blogger highly suggests not using this strategy, offering advice to prospective writers to make sure that syllables are consistent across a couplet. I was not really considering doing a rhyming book before; however, this blog post made me interested to try it out and see how rhyming might make my story more compelling to a younger audience. Also, I learned through my research the importance of selecting an appropriate age audience for your book. I want for my book to be read in the Lower School at Lovett; so, I will probably choose an age group of around the third grade to reach the most students. Overall, today I got a lot accomplished and cannot wait to start writing my book!