Visit Us at the National Book Festival

The 16th Library of Congress National Book Festival, featuring more than 120 authors, illustrators and poets, will be this Saturday, September 24. If you have a moment, stop in and visit us in the Expo Hall. We’ll have activities for all ages, all day, but even if you can’t get to the Book Festival, you can experience some of the activities. Here are a couple of the ways that we connect books to primary sources:

Coding isn’t a new idea, and we’ll invite visitors to use Jefferson’s Cipher for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1803 to write a brief message. For more recent uses of coding, they might read books by National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang.

We also have identified primary sources for a few of the books that will be featured at this year’s festival – many others would work, too! We’ll be inviting visitors to take a close look at the primary sources and leave us notes on what they see. If you would like to do the same with your students here’s a sneak peek at some of the items we’ll be using.

Primary sources	Titles and authors
The Veterinary Corps, U.S. Army	Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear Sophie Blackall
Mrs. Anna Kelter, 67, looks in horror at damage done by rioters to her store at 551 Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn	Burn Baby Burn Meg Medina
	March: Book Three Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin
	Grover Cleveland, Again! A Treasury of American Presidents Ken Burns
	Ghosts Raina Telgemeier

Let us know in the comments what you notice about the primary sources we’ve chosen and how they connect to the books we’re using. And if you connect a Library of Congress primary source  to a book featured at this year’s festival let us know in the comments.