Solana Vista School played host to a special VIP guest on May 20 when author Minh Lê stopped in for a school-wide assembly led by the school’s third-grade Student Council.
Throughout the school year, Solana Vista students have been reading and loving Lê’s collection of picture books, including “Drawn Together, “LIFT”, “Real to Me”, “Let Me Finish!” and his most recent release, “Built to Last”. To welcome the author to campus, the students created a wall full of artwork inspired by his books.
“Our students have been counting the days until they meet Minh Lê!”said Principal Lisa Wilken. “Engaging with the author of cherished stories will have a lasting impact on our growing readers and writers.”
The visit to Solana Vista was coordinated by curriculum resource teacher/ librarian Monica Rainville, along with the librarians at the six other Solana Beach School District schools and sponsored by each individual PTO. That week, Lê went to all seven Solana Beach schools, with each one taking its own unique approach.
Lê’s message was all about the power of imagination. He shared his origin story of becoming a writer, a journey that started out by being just a really good reader, revealing a poem he wrote about books when he was in the fifth or sixth grade. The words of his typewriter-typed poem appeared on the big screen: “A book is the key to your imagination that will open the way to a magical location…”
At Solana Vista, he read from “LIFT”, his picture book about how with the press of a magical elevator button, a young girl is sent her off on adventures in the jungle, outer space and a mountaintop with her baby brother. On the wall of the Solana Vista’s multi-use room were all of the elevator buttons the students had created, which flipped open to reveal the destinations they dreamed up.
As he read from the book, students were encouraged to make the “ding” sound of the elevator button being pressed.
During the assembly, the San Diego based author also shared his book, “Drawn Together”, the winner of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. The touching picture book tells a story that is personally meaningful to both Lê as a Vietnamese American and his illustrator, Dan Santat, a Thai American. Like the main character in the book, both of them spoke mostly English while their grandparents spoke a different language, and it was sometimes hard to talk to each other.
In “Drawn Together”, a grandfather and grandson are having an awkward afternoon until they start doing art together, creating their own world, drawing and painting wizards and heroes and dragons.
“The boy thinks ‘Right when I gave up on talking, my grandfather surprised me by revealing a world beyond words’,” the story reads. “And in a flash, we see each other for the first time.”
Thanks to the Solana Beach Schools Foundation, each Solana Vista student got to go home with an autographed copy of “Drawn Together” to add to their home libraries and further inspire their imaginations.
