Overview | Residencies | Sample Presentations
Thank you for your interest in my school enrichment programs. Although teaching commitments, research trips, and writing deadlines limit the number of schools I can visit each year, I do adore my time with students and I would love to find a way to work with yours! Please review the program information below and contact me by email (loreegriffinburns [at] yahoo [dot] com) if you’d like to talk over the possibilities. If we can’t schedule something for the upcoming year, perhaps we can look ahead to the next one.
Visit Overview
- A day-long school visit generally includes up to four classroom or assembly presentations.
- Presentations to K-3 students are approximately thirty minutes long, including time for student questions and answers.
- My presentations for grades 4-8 are closer to sixty minutes long, including time for questions and answers.
- Most of my school visit presentations can be adapted to suit a mixed-age family audience, so do reach out if you’d like me to visit your public library or literacy event.
Residencies
I love fostering a love of the outdoors, especially by helping students to observe, explore, study, and write about the world outside their windows. If your school has access to nearby green spaces and you’d like to discuss a longer-than-a-day mentorship program, please contact me using the form at the bottom of this page. I’d be delighted to discuss the possibilities with you.
Sample Presentations
I can design a program tailored to any of the books I’ve written, and I’m happy to work with you to highlight connections to classroom curricula. Below are descriptions of just a few of the popular programs I’ve shared with students over the years.
One Long Line of Learning (Grades K through 3)
Leading students through the fascinating single-file marching habits of the pine processionary caterpillar–and several scientists who tried to understand those habits–Loree helps young reader-explorers wonder about the creatures around them, what they know about those creatures, and how they might learn more.
Spreading the Buzz (Grades K through 3)
Drawing on her picture book Honeybee Rescue, Loree brings students straight into a honeybee hive. She also introduces them to a New England beekeeper whose life’s work is to save colonies whose nests make their human neighbors nervous. Students will leave this presentation with a deeper understanding of honeybees, their biology, and their importance to our ecosystem … and they’ll never look at a vacuum cleaner the same way again!
Lepidopta-who? (Grades K through 3)
In this program, Loree highlights the family of insects known to scientists as lepidopterans: butterflies and moths. Sharing stories from her picture books Handle with Care and You’re Invited to a Moth Ball, this program provides an overview of the lepidopteran life cycle as well as tips and tricks for aspiring butterfly and moth scientists … or, because its more fun to say, aspiring lepidopterists!
Writing Adventures (Grades K through 3)
In this program, Loree shares the tools she has used to conduct field research for each of her books … and asks students to guess what the book in question was about. This interactive presentation keeps younger students engaged and helps them to think about both writing and science in new ways.
The Long Line of Learning (Grades 4 through 8)
Drawing on the content of several of her published books, especially One Long Line, Loree engages students in some deep thinking about who does science, and why. But the heart of this presentation–and of Loree’s work in general, to be honest–is the how of it all. How do we know what we know about this world we live in? How does a curious person learn even more? How much is left for us to learn, anyway? We’ll cover it all.
What’s up with Honeybees? (Grades 4 through 8)
Drawing on the content of The Hive Detectives and Honeybee Rescue, Loree introduces students to the intriguing world of the honeybee and to the work of scientists who are trying to understand the mysterious maladies currently threatening that world. This presentation puts students into a dramatic and real-world crisis and shows them how the tools and methods of science can (and are) being used to understand it.
What’s Your Angle? (Grades 4 through 8)
Writers are storytellers, and we have been telling and re-telling the same stories for ages. How do we keep these stories interesting? By telling them from our own unique point of view, that’s how. In this presentation, Loree uses slides, props and anecdotes to tell students how her first book, Tracking Trash, came to be … even though the story had been told several times before. Students leave the presentation with an understanding of the bookmaking process as well as an awareness of how to tell unique stories by infusing them with their own unique interests.
Getting Your Hands Dirty: A Research Workshop (Grades 4 through 8)
This program is designed to get students thinking broadly and deeply about how to support their own nonfiction writing projects through research. Most of us begin this work online or in the library … but that is not what this workshop is about. Rather, Loree will help students think beyond these beginning resources, pushing them to mine their own lives and communities, to expand their definition of an ‘expert,’ and to embrace the idea that writing comes to life when writers find ways to explore a topic with their own two hands.