Monday Morning Bibs & Bobs

Saturday was a fabulous day spent at The Children's Museum in Kitchener, Ontario. Guy and I performed our Pirate & Penguin play as part of the Turning Pages Literary Festival. There were lots of talented authors and illustrators there, and The Children's Museum is an amazing place! Hopefully I'll get some photos from the folks at Words Worth Books who worked with the museum to organise this amazing event, and when I do, I'll be sure to post 'em!

The photo you see above is taken from The Scarborough Mirror. About a month ago I did five(!) school presentations at the Ionview Public School in Scarborough. It was an amazing day filled with energetic, imaginative kids and wonderful, caring teachers. Simply put, that school rocks. Here's the write-up from the Mirror about that day:

Author and illustrator Patricia Storms visits students at Ionview Public School on a recent afternoon as part of the school's Awaken the Reader Within You program. The month long program encouraged students in all grades to read a variety of books, newspapers, magazines or other materials and track their reading time. Individuals and classes were rewarded with prizes for logging the most amount of time reading. Students also produced posters to promote their favourite books.

I came in 3rd this year for the 2009 OCNA Better Newspaper Awards, for the category of Cartoonist of the Year. This time I was nominated for my cartoons from Vaughan Today. I would have liked to have taken home a first, but what the heck – I'm in the top 3! The judge this year was the lovely and talented cartoonist Susan Dewar. Her comments about local cartoonists:

Local cartoons are vital to both national and local newspapers. They can create more attention and involved more readers than any other spot in a paper. Ontario is well served by this batch of wiley creators.

And I leave you with another photo of moi, taken a while back when I was in Nunavut. It's from the Kivalliq News, when I was presenting in Rankin Inlet. Note the Inuktitut language at the top of the picture. Still miss that place...sigh...

Comments

[bookfraud]

congrats on the award! love the fact you're not bellyaching on placement, which i would have certainly done in your situation. love the newspaper photos, too--you look extremely engaged. were the children entrhalled?

[patricia]

Not to brag or anything, but at both places, the school in Scarborough, and in Nunavut, yeah, the kids LOVED my presentations. It's always a blast when I present to schools. What's not to love about cartoons??