Hello and happy Thursday. I haven’t told you yet, but I will soon experience some changes work-wise. If you didn’t know, I’m a school teacher, and for the past year I’ve been working with first-graders. Now, come August, I will be working with seniors in an AP Research course. It’s a big change and I’m very excited about it.

If I were still teaching elementary, though, I’d suggest The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes as a part of the reading plan, maybe not for first-graders, but for second or third grade. At the beginning of the book, we are told that Wanda, a girl who is teased by her classmates for the clothes she wears and for her foreign accent, is not coming back to school. Maddie, one of the girls who used to make fun of her, or at least stood by and said nothing when other people did it, feels horrible about Wanda’s not coming back and the reasons behind it and decides to never let something like that happen again. This story is short and it isn’t particularly cute, but it is so powerful, I think every child will get something out of reading it.