Author Gets a Read on What Students Want

Children’s author Caroline Arnold came to Taft Elementary School on Thursday equipped with animal slides, copies of her nonfiction wildlife books and theories about the creative process.

But the 200 or so kids seated on the floor were most fascinated with the process of physically binding a book.

Arnold, who reminded them it wasn’t her specialty, showed them how eight pages at a time are printed on one large sheet. The glossy paper is then put into a folding machine, sewed together and glued to the binding.

That drew a huge round of applause from her young audience.

“That’s how I feel when the book is finished,” she said. “It’s my favorite time.”

School officials do not care if the students are grabbed by the text or the binding, as long as they develop an interest in books.

That was the motivation for the second annual Festival of Authors week at the Orange Unified School District. Officials collaborated with the Orange Public Library to bring 21 children’s authors to the elementary and middle schools.

Arnold, the 52-year-old author of 100 books, said the festival gave the authors a chance to meet their audience. Kids today are very demanding readers, she said.

“You have to make the books good and about topics that engage the children,” she said. “Kids don’t have a lot of patience. I teach my writing students that if you don’t hook the reader in the first paragraph, the kid will close the book.”

The large, stunning photos of wildlife that adorn her books typify publishing house thinking these days, Arnold said. Publishers realize books often come second to television and computers.

“Kids always had to read for school,” Arnold added. “Books like mine are being used more now. In the bad old days, it was just the boring textbooks. . . . Kids don’t tolerate bad writing anymore.”

Judy Wyant, the school’s librarian, said she reads to children all the time in an effort to instill a love for books and writing at an early age.

Parents who think they are too pressed to read to their children often don’t realize that the literate adult developed the reading habit at a very young age, she added.

“I can read them a book in 10 minutes,” Wyant said. “That’s all it takes.”