Get Set for Screen-Free Week!

Monday marks the beginning of Screen-Free Week, a time to unplug, experience something new, and take time to be present with friends and family. In anticipation, we’ve put together a list of activities to do with your kids that are inspired by some of our favorite new and classic children’s books.  If you have other ideas, share them with us, and let's make sure our screen-free days are filled with fun and imagination!

 So here we go!


 Monday 4/29

Invent a Hugo Cabret Flip Book


If you haven't seen this beautiful--and quite large--book by Brian Selznick, you're really missing out. Though the size of the book makes it look daunting on the shelf, it pages are filled with mostly illustrations that are both accompaniments to the text, and in parts can stand in place of the text. The resulting hybrid is hard to categorize, and reminds us of a combination picture book, collection of film stills, and flip book. We love the creativity of the story, and so to kick off our Screen-Free Week activities, we thought it would be fun to try making a flip book. It might not be as elaborate or large as Hugo Cabret, but what a great way be crafty and give illustrating a shot.

Tuesday 4/30

Cool Cooking

We're putting out our first kid's cookbook this summer, and it happens to be full of easy, delicious recipes from around the world. You won't be able to make the recipes from the book yet (though we did post a rather yummy dessert recipe from it in a past blog post), but that doesn't mean you can't find other great recipes to experiment with during Screen-Free Week. Look for something new and exciting, go get the ingredients, and spend a day in the kitchen with your kids. At the end of the day, you can all sit down and have a meal together. Family time and delicious food, what could be better?

Katie and Aaron DeYoe: Illustrator Interview

Katie and Aaron DeYoe are probably the cutest pair of redheads you'll ever meet, not to mention incredibly talented illustrators. They met while studying graphic design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and though they are both full-time graphic designers, they spend most of their free time drawing, doodling, painting, and printing. They also enjoy riding their serendipitously matching red Schwinns around Minneapolis.

We took a bit of time to chat with Aaron about their work on The Mighty Quinn, out in May from Scarletta Junior Readers, and how it's been working as a duo.

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1. The Mighty Quinn is the first book that you’ve illustrated together. How has the experience been so far?

Really good! We have discovered that our process is mostly switching between art director and illustrator. Sometimes I will have a vision for a particular illustration that I know Katie can execute better than me...and vice versa.

2. What have you enjoyed most about it?

Discovering how we work as a team. A long-term goal of ours is work collaboratively full time, and this project is helping us discover what that will be like.

3. Have their been unexpected challenges?

We set high expectations for ourselves, and struggle with that sometimes. Otherwise, nothing too unexpected.

4. Where did the style for the drawings come from? Is it a combination of your personal styles or does it lean toward one of your personal styles?

A lot of the "body language" that the characters convey in the illustrations are products of Katie's expertise. I will try to simplify her sketches down into hard, minimal lines. We tag-team a lot of the details and usually art direct each other.

6. What is your process for creating the illustrations? And what medium do you use?

Building Author Relationships Online

Was it just us, or did authors used to have an air of mystery about them? Maybe you saw them once at a book signing, but mostly they were just names on the covers of your favorite books. You felt a connection to them because of the words they wrote, but it didn't go far beyond that. Now things are different. With social media and the internet, authors, like everyone else, are searchable, followable, and accessible to everyone (not just those able to come to a signing). So what does that mean for readers?

I sent a tweet last winter that said my plan for the night was to curl up with some takeout food and a new book I had gotten. With Twitter, I usually expect my tweets to get lost in the chatter, but not long after, the author of said book tweeted me back to say it sounded like a perfect night. Did she have to do this? Not at all, and not every author does. But it certainly made me excited to read the book, and more willing to check out her other titles. And obviously, it made me want to talk more about her and her book to friends. And we can all agree that these things are important for an author. That's why it seems like more and more authors are taking the plunge and getting involved online.

Scarletta authors, and the authors of our imprints, get involved in different ways as well, and we do what we can to support whatever avenue they choose to take. Some of our authors run blogs and websites, which you can find by going to the authors section on the left side of this page, and some are on social networking sites*. We even feature our new authors on this blog so you can read about them before their books have even come out. (Have you read the interview we did we Betsy's Day at the Game author, Greg Bancroft? Or the guest blog written by The Mighty Quinn author, Robyn Parnell?)

We want readers to get to know our authors and be as excited as we are about their books. So we want to know, in this day and age of accessibility, how much to you like to connect with authors online? And what is your preferred outlet--reading a blog, chatting on Twitter, getting updates in your Facebook newsfeed, or maybe all of the above?

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Click here for Pendred Noyce's Facebook page for Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers and here for her Twitter profile

Click here for Anne Sawyer Aitch's Facebook fan page for Nalah and the Pink Tiger

Click here for Bob Macdonald's Twitter account

Click here for Pamela Cory's Facebook page

Author Guest Blog: Robyn Parnell

Robyn Parnell is the author of The Mighty Quinn, a middle grade novel being published by Scarletta Junior Readers next May. But long before she started writing The Mighty Quinn she was volunteering in a creative writing group at her son's school in Hillsboro, Oregon. It was during that time that she not only met the children who would later become role models for characters in The Mighty Quinn but where she met a boy who would challenge her to find an interesting story in a town where supposedly nothing special ever happened.


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Darers Go First

By Robyn Parnell Can Zorgon the Magnificent speak truths without betraying secrets? Is it clever or cowardly for a Herculon Sentry to passively resist persecution? Should the Galactic Council's actions be dependent upon mitigating circumstances or unwavering doctrines? Must the Zirconium Raider Queen fight for every noble cause, or carefully choose her battles? Can Solarian Seekers cultivate new allies without discarding the Old Ways?
Max* was the most precocious of the students in the creative writing group I'd been asked to lead at my son's school. He incorporated universal themes into his character's dilemmas, but refused to cast those characters in our universe. His stories were situated on faraway planets in distant galaxies. While I saw nothing particularly wrong with specialization, for Max, space was the final, and only, frontier.
He was the first student to read his stories aloud, and the last to recognize that his critiques of the others' recurrent topics ("Dude, your villains always die in fiery crashes!" "Alyssa, another stray Rottweiler looking for a home?!") also applied to his own works.
Although the students had been chosen for the group due to their creative writing aptitude, they initially, rigidly, followed what I privately called the preteen's "anyone but us/anywhere but here" directives of storytelling:

1.) Protagonists must be extra-normal; ideally, super beings with super powers (Rottweilers included)

2.) Stories must take place "somewhere else" – another time, country, dimension, galaxy – in order to be interesting.

As the weeks passed and we discussed SCAC vitals (setting, characters, action, conflict), the students alternately supported and challenged each other through character matrixes and plot exercises. Few events in my writing life have been as rewarding as hearing a ten-year-old author's epiphany: "There's no suspense when mega-brave, mega-smart, mega-powerful characters get mega-fast solutions to their mega-big problems." (Yessssssssssss! They said it, so I don't have to!)

Trends in Children's Literature

You've probably heard...we love kid's books. Which is why we created Scarletta Junior Readers and Scarletta Kids, so we can spend a lot more time with children's literature! Because this is still a new adventure for us, we decided to do some basic digging in children's lit trends.
First, how much are kids reading? Turns out they're reading less than ever. The reasons? Homework and standardized testing are taking up a lot of their free time. And this has some seriously negative effects. Studies have shown that:

• Kids who are readers do better at school and in life
• Children and teens who read for pleasure on a daily or weekly basis score better on reading tests than infrequent readers
• Frequent readers also score better on writing tests
• Advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages
• Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic activities, such as volunteering