Greetings, Wonderful Busload of Books Tour Host!

We’ve pulled together the following materials to give you a high-level sense of the various steps involved in hosting us at your school. More detail will be provided closer to our actual visit, but for now…

FREE BOOKS! HOORAY!

Free books for every student and teacher will be shipped directly to your school from First Book well in advance of our visit.

• A few weeks prior to our visit, distribute the teacher copies only.
• Following our assembly on the day of our visit, distribute the copies to the students.

We will be sending book plates in advance of our visit for you to place inside the books before they are distributed to students.

SUPPORTING MATERIALS/ACTIVITIES

• Video – We will provide a personalized video (hosted on our website), for you to use in introducing us to your students in advance of our visit.
• Pre-visit materials – We’ve prepared classroom exercises teachers can use to introduce our books, acclimate students to the related themes, and prepare them for our visit.
• Post-visit materials — We’ve also created exercises for teachers to reinforce and expand upon the themes of our presentations and give students an opportunity to apply them.

 The materials are being offered as an optional layer of support for your teachers and students. Their use is encouraged but not required!

BASIC SCHEDULE (for the day of our visit)

• 8:00am – we arrive and get set up
• 9:00am–10:00am – first assembly (pre-K–1 or 2–5, your choice)
• 10:30am–11:30am – second assembly (pre-K–1 or 2–5, your choice)
• 12:00pm–1:00pm – lunch/small group session

For the sake of our sanity across 50+ visits, having a set schedule is really helpful, but if the above simply doesn’t work for your school, let us know, and we can discuss alternatives.

SMALL GROUP SESSION

• We’d love to have lunch with a small group (8-10) of your students and a handful of your teachers. We’ll answer questions, take photos, sign books, and maybe even take a tour of the bus!
• We encourage you to select students you think would get the most out of the opportunity—and not necessarily your highest-achieving students. This is our chance for direct engagement, so if there are kids you think might especially benefit from spending some time with us, please send them our way!
• We’ll be providing a special permission slip for the students you select for this group. We’ll be asking for permission to photograph them for use in our social media posts. We’ll also be selecting one student from each school to potentially include (with first name, short quote, and illustrated likeness) in a book we’re making about the tour.

RESEARCH PROJECT

• We are partnering with the Department of Education at Washington College to conduct the first-ever large-scale study to measure the impact of author visits in Title I schools. The resulting data could provide a difference-making tool for educators, authors, and grant writers to use in facilitating an increase in author visits and book giveaways to Title I schools in the future.
• We’ll be asking you to oversee the administration of three simple surveys, either on paper or online.
       1) conducted as a baseline prior to our visit
       2) conducted directly after our assemblies on the day of our visit
       3) conducted one month following our visit
• Our research team will cover the cost of printing and mailing paper surveys, and will support you in keeping track of the administration of the surveys by sending reminder emails.
• We will share a video that describes the research project, and its purpose, aimed at children and families. This information will help provide context and answer questions about what the surveys will look like, and why they are important.
• We will provide a consent form for you to send home with students in advance of our visit—giving parents an opportunity to opt out of their child participating in the research. (Alternately, we will provide opt-in forms if your district requires it.)
• We will also ask teachers, librarians, other staff and administrators to participate in surveys, too. Understanding the experiences of school professionals is critical to demonstrating the impact of an author visit experience to a national audience.
• We will provide additional information on the research in the coming months, once the details of the project are finalized and approved by the Washington College Institutional Review Board. 
• The person leading the research project is the wonderful and wise Dr. Sara Clarke-De Reza, Professor of Education at Washington College. You may reach out to her directly with questions.

We won’t require your school to participate in the research, but we’d really, really (really!) appreciate if you would. The scale and structure of our tour presents once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collect this potentially transformative data, and the more schools that participate, the more meaningful the results will be.

TECH NEEDS

• Digital projector (we’ll bring our own adapters)
• Screen (the bigger the better!)
• Two microphones (hand-held wireless is ideal, but cords are also fine)

Please let us know if you’re unable provide any of the above! 

THE BUS

We’d love to park the bus prominently outside your school on the day of our visit so your students can all see it as they arrive (as long as this is not too disruptive, of course)

DONORS CHOOSE

• We encourage you to designate at least one teacher to set up a DonorsChoose campaign (which allows private donors to help individual teachers buy classroom supplies), which we will promote to our followers.

This is not mandatory! But it’s a great way for the people following our tour to support your school directly—and an opportunity for your community to learn about how to set up similar campaigns in the future.

WHAT ELSE?

We’ve tried to give you a helpful overview of what to expect without drowning you in too much detail at this point. But if you have any burning questions now, feel free to send us an email.

Click here to confirm the date of our visit, give us your final numbers, and officially accept our invitation to host us on the tour! Please confirm by December 8th!