For a whole week at Roper Elementary School, the 900-some students walking the halls had a celebrity in their midst.

A real, live author.

His name is Tom Birdseye. He lives in Oregon and he was a teacher until he turned 30 and decided to write children's books.

That was 29 years ago, and he's written 18 of them since then. He's working on Nos. 19 and 20.

He came to Lincoln to spend the week talking about writing at Roper.

On Friday afternoon, a group of first-graders in the media center had no end of questions.

How many years does it take to write a perfect book?

(He's never written a perfect book, he said, but a chapter book takes about two years.)

How hard is it to write?

(Pretty hard.)

How does the paper stick together at the spine?

(He showed them.)

They stumped him with a few.

What was your third book? Your eighth? Your 10th?

(Those require a little research.)

The question-and-answer session was nearly the last event of the weeklong focus on literacy during which every student got to meet with Birdseye.

It's the ninth such event Principal Dan Navratil has hosted at Roper and at Lakeview, where he used to be principal. He arranges one every few years, he said.

"I always wanted to have youngsters exposed to quality literature and to experience firsthand the delight of reading."

The Roper parent organization raised money to pay for Birdseye's visit, and the week was packed with activities. Each grade arranged activities around one of his books.

Along the theme of "Oh Yeah!" -- a book about camping in the backyard -- kindergartners set up a tent. Some of the older kids got a visit from employees of Scheels, who brought all kinds of camping gear.

First-graders took Birdseye's "Look Out Jack! The Giant is Back" and created their own giants. Then each class wrote its own what-if-the-giant-came-to-the-classroom stories and presented them to Birdseye on Friday.

Some students did bubble art or shaving cream art, based on his "Soap! Soap! Don't Forget the Soap!" and lots of guests came in to read.

Birdseye likes to talk to kids about what he does.

"I think a lot of people think writing is something only some people can do," he said. "So I try to blow that out of the water."

To that end, he gave the first-graders a lesson on using detail in their stories.

Use all your senses, he told them.

And when you do, a sentence like "He went to school" can become "Jakob raced to Roper Elementary on his bike in the pounding rain."

Which brought him to a final point: Rewriting is super important.

"If it weren't for rewriting I wouldn't have published books," he said. "Because my first sentences are like ‘The boy went to school.'"

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.