Author Vistit- Michael Anthony Steele

Michael Anthony Steele, author and scriptwriter, visited our district last week.  We booked him for 4 1/2 days to visit 6 elementary schools.  He was super down to earth and very easy to work with!

He did a show with K-2nd and with 3rd-5th grade. His shows are interactive and TEKs based.  He introduced basic vocabulary to K-2nd.  With 3rd-5th he expanded that vocabulary, talking in detail about scrips (parts of a script, how to write a script, how it's different than writing a book, etc).

He also had students repeat the phrase "I can do that!"  He talked about how he got into script writing and how even though we all have that voice in the back of our heads saying negative things we need to tell ourselves "I can do that" and do it.

I was impressed with his TEKs based show.  Not only was it educational, it was interactive, motivational and entertaining.  The students responded well to him  They are still talking about him and it's been a week since he was here!

Steele wrote about his time in our district on his website.  You can scroll through and read about each school.  Look for my school!

I also wrote an article on our school's website.  You can read about it here.  The hard thing about this blog and the article I wrote is you just can't include all the awesomeness!  There's so much to write about and so many cool things.  You just need to contact him for an author visit to see what I mean!

The school counselor and I took him out to lunch.  I LOVE going to lunch with authors!  It's "funny" to me that I can be sitting with well known authors but no one else in the restaurant knows this.  Mostly because authors aren't really visually famous.  I mean that most people don't know what an author looks so they don't recognize them.  They know their name but not their face.  So I'm sitting in a restaurant with a famous person but no one else knows that.  Ha!  That cracks me up!

Conversation flowed easily.  Our school counselor was not able to attend any of his sessions so she had some questions for him about how he got started.  We talked about ghost writing, publishers asking authors to write about specific topics, small town life verses city life and so much more.

I highly recommend Steele for an author visit!