My daughter Anna, teacher turned librarian, and I don’t usually have serious disagreements about books. And truthfully, this one isn’t major. We are both in mourning with the death of Beverly Cleary at 104 this past weekend. In our difference-of-opinion discussion, she began read-alouds to her special education classes with Judy Blume’s Fudge stories while I started my read-alouds to second graders with Ramona books, knowing that Ramona and her friends on Klickitat Street would hook children on reading. Their cries for a second Ramona read-aloud fell on deaf ears since I had other books to introduce. I told them they could find more of Beverly Cleary in the library.
My successful strategy had the Beautiful Butler Bunch (my class name) cleaning Ramona books off the shelves of the school library under the watchful eye of a librarian with RULES. Each elementary class of the 2nd to 4th grade school had a weekly library hour, and until I intervened (a story for another day) designated shelves where they could choose books. The librarian realized that all the Ramona books were with children in my classroom and quickly added a new rule. She set a limit of how many Ramona books could go to the Beautiful Butler Bunch – four or five as I recall.
However, second-graders, like Ramona herself, are clever creatures. Armed with their books from the library and the set on my personal classroom shelves, they organized to get the limit from the library, and trade those and mine among themselves until their allotted time to return to the library. You might be able to guess what they looked for when the book order leaflets came in!
It seems appropriate and you might want to mark your calendar that national D. E. A. R. Day (Drop Everything and Read) is April 12 in honor of Beverly Cleary’s birthday.
My disagreement with Anna is slight since both Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume have turned a multitude of children on to reading. Some years ago, we visited Anna and her husband when they lived in Oregon. She made a list of possible choices for things to see and do in Portland. When we came to one item, we were in complete agreement. No question that we both wanted to go to Klickitat Street!