Jennifer Erichsen, a student at Emerald Heights Elementary School in Silverdale, spends most nights awake past her bedtime reading in her room. For a girl who loves reading chapter books, she is more than excited for a published author to visit her class.
“I’m mostly excited and just a bit nervous,” Jennifer, 8, said last week. “I get nervous when I meet new people.”
Aside from both being in the second grade, that’s what Jennifer and Alvin Ho have in common — being nervous about meeting new people. Alvin Ho is the main character in a series of books written by Lenore Look, who will be visiting Jennifer’s class Friday, as well as meeting with other first through fourth grade students.
Alvin is actually deathly afraid of new people because he has social performance anxiety disorder. He’s afraid of many things including school, girls and natural disasters, that have Shannon Tracewell’s second grade class relating to some of his fears, as well as finding a few of them funny.
Erin Kemery said one of her favorite scenes is when one of the characters scares a bully. Scaring her friends isn’t necessarily a pastime, but she finds humor in doing it.
“I like to scare people,” Erin, 8, said. “I like to sneak up on people and touch them and say, ‘Boo!’”
In the fall, Tracewell introduced her class to “Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School and Other Scary Things,” the first in the chapter book series, because two thirds of her class is made up of boys. Her entire class enjoyed the book and they wrote letters to Look expressing their interest in her stories and drew accompanying pictures of scenes from the book. Because Look’s publisher, Random House, forwards fan mail in bundles, she received the class’ letters in January.
“I often get letters from kids writing to me on their own,” Look, 49, said. “I seldom get from a class. It was just out of the blue. It made my day, and my mom’s.”
Coincidentally Look was scheduled to visit Kimball Elementary School, her alma mater in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle — she now lives in New Jersey — so she immediately contacted Emerald Heights to see if she could visit them as well. And she is just as excited to meet the students as they are to meet her.
Tracewell was prompted to have her students write to Look to show how writing can have an affect on others besides the writer. When she taught fifth grade, she had students write to an author as part of a book project and she wasn’t sure how it would turn out with second graders. But, seeing their enthusiasm for writing and reading grow, it seemed to have worked.
And, Look’s visit is a bonus.
“It helps the kids feel like they have a connection to the outside world,” Tracewell said.
Dale Durham, 8, had been reading Look’s books before his class was introduced to them in the fall. The characters portray exaggerated emotions and feelings that make the books enjoyable to read, he and his peers said.
The fourth book in the series is expected to be released in September, Look said. Opposite to Alvin Ho is enthusiastic Ruby Lu, a character in another one of Look’s children series. Tracewell’s class is reading this series as they anticipate Look’s visit.
The name, Alvin Ho, is a pun on the famous chivalrous knight “Ivanhoe,” by Sir Walter Scott.
“That is a very boring book,” Look said. “I wanted to make this my book. I wanted to make it a book where the kids would be flipping the pages and moving very fast.”
