Red Cedar Book Award-winning author, Sara Leach ’89
Sara Leach, class of 1989, recently visited the Jr. School Library. She sat down with the Grade 5s to discuss her new book Warm Up, and stayed behind for a book signing.
Warm Up is one of the new Orca Limelights novels, an ongoing series about performing arts (students can check out any of the books in this series in the JS Library).
Sara talked to the Grade 5 girls about her pathway from Yorkie to author. She even showed a picture of her class in Grade 5 at York House! Her advice to aspiring authors is to read and have lots of adventures. You can turn where you live and what you do into great stories!
Now living in Whistler, Sara is an author, a teacher librarian and mother of a son and daughter. She loves to ski and hike in the mountains, which became the setting for her Red Cedar Book Award-winning novel Count Me In.
Our Student Exec organized a current events seminar over the lunch hour on Tuesday, January 27th. Staff and students met to discuss important events and issues affecting the world today. Head Girl Ally fills us in:
Current Events Seminar in the Sr. Library – Tues. Jan. 27, 2015.
The idea for a current events seminar stemmed from an announcement school administrators made at assembly at the beginning of this year. They talked about how we as a community can self-reflect during times of global turmoil. A couple members of the student exec thought that as important as self-reflection is, the best thing we can do when faced with issues we don’t completely understand is talk them out.
The issues we ended up talking about included Boko Haram and Nigeria, specifically, the world’s underwhelming reaction to the terrorism. We also talked about how we often treat Africa like a country, not a continent.
We also touched on the beheadings in Saudi Arabia. This one hit close to home for us as an all-girls school, as we ended up discussing women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.
To finish, we broke up into three smaller groups and discussed Charlie Hebdo. We also chatted about how in light of the dangers in Paris, the Grade 8 France trip was cancelled this year.
All in all, everything went pretty well. The seminar was completely organized and lead by students, and we were all really proud of what we did. That said, this was also a test run. Now we have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, and we hope to use this knowledge to hold better conversations in the future. Ultimately, we want this to be a monthly, or even weekly occurrence. We also hope that other students or staff members will want to lead a seminar on an issue they are passionate about.
