Twitter Buzz

Are you following the Pembina Escarpment Reading Council on Twitter @PercReads? We tweet and retweet lots of interesting information.  Since starting the twitter feed in the fall, we have been retweeted by many Manitoba Reading Association followers and many authors! It is exciting when an author replies or retweets to your tweet!

@mra_mb is hosting its first twitter chat on January 21st with Tanny McGregor. Many of us are becoming good friends with Tanny through the tweets we share and we are looking forward to sharing the Twitter chat with her and then hearing her in person in April in Winnipeg.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, there are many tutorials available to help you learn more.  Just signing up and following a few people is a great way to get started. Follow @percreads and @mra_mb to get a taste for world of Twitter.

What interesting information have I found on Twitter in the last few months?  Check some of these out:

• Jonathan Auxier won the 2015 TD Canadian Children's Literature Award. Author of The Night Gardener, a chilling novel about orphan who become servants in a haunted mansion. MRA invited to be on an author's panel.  Jonathan will be a new father in the spring so is unable to join us.  Check out his middle-grade novel. I also heard him interviewed on CBC by @terrymacleod and ordered the book. Expect a blog post about it in the upcoming months.
• Check out the other nominees for the TD Children's Literature Award. I had also ordered From Vimy to Victory:  Canada's Fight to the Finish in World War I by Hugh Brewster and shared it with a grade 6 class prior to Remembrance Day.  It seemed to be a popular pick.
• The 2014 winner was The Man with the Violin by Kathy Stinson, illustrated by Dusan Petricic. This is a book I shared at the PERC workshop in previous years.  I really appreciate this book and it has caused me to follow up on Dusan Petricic's work. 
• I subscribed to the Canadian Children's Book Centre newsletter and get great information every month. Do you know Family Literacy Day is January 27th? What are you doing to celebrate Family Literacy?
• American Library Association Awards will be announced on Monday, January 11th! Lots of tweets from classrooms on who the winners should be! Stay tuned.

If you are not on Twitter, you probably think it is one more thing that will require your valuable time.  Yes it will take time. Personally, I spend much less time on other social media now and find far more useful info on Twitter.  Try it and send me feedback.

Barb Lepp

PERC Past-chairperson