Have you visited places that are connected with the books you are booktalking? Tell your audience about them. I stood at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, once the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated. I couldn't stop crying. I saw, in the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, newspaper ads that were placed by freed slaves 30 years after the Civil War ended, in which they were still looking for family members who had been sold away from them.

I was in Louisiana in January of 1996, a bitterly cold month everywhere. When I read that many slaves in Louisiana never even had shoes to wear, I realized just what that might mean. It can be terribly cold in Louisiana.

Kids are so interested when you can personalize a booktalk.