Memories

The garage is a mess and I have been trying to spend 15 minutes a day in there trying to get things cleaned up. You know there are just boxes out there that just keep getting pushed to the side or moved to another shelf and they are never gone through to see what is really in there and is it worth keeping what is in there. So today I came across a rubbermaid bin, when I opened it up it was about half full of books. The bin was given to me almost 7 years ago, by my aunt. These were books that my cousins had outgrown and she passed onto me to use in my classroom. This has been the bin that rides in the back of my Suburban on numerous occasions and I can't lift the thing so I slowly take some books out of it and carry them into my classroom, that is of course on days that I remember it is in the back. Then when we go places and need to load up the back of the Suburban the bin comes out and sits back in the garage until the cycle is repeated all over again.

So today I bring the bin of books into my house and sit down at the computer to lexile level them (something that we use to level books as an educator). I am going through them and leveling them and come across a book titled "Helen Keller Courage in the Dark" and what fond memories come rushing back into my brain. I don't remember how old I was but I read a book about Helen Keller when I was a child and what a miraculous woman she was. For someone who was blind and deaf she was amazing! Later I came across another Helen Keller book "A Girl Named Helen Keller." I look forward to taking these 2 books into my classroom this year and teaching them about this amazing woman!

Another book I came across took me back to my student teaching time. It is "Chicken Soup With Rice" by Maurice Sendak. I student taught in a first grade classroom back in the fall of 1997 and my cooperating teacher had blown up the poems for every month into poster size and the students learned the poems every month. My first year teaching I so wanted to use those poems in my classroom and couldn't locate the book. The copyright date is 1962 no wonder I couldn't find it. But now I have it and I believe I will use the poems with my students this year. They are just fun silly poems that I know my second graders will enjoy! Thanks Karen Proctor for introducing this book to me and now 10 years later I finally own it...actually I have had it for the past 7 years and just didn't know it.