First book. Twenty minutes after lunch and recess, a time to re-civilize ourselves. Sit and breathe, then ring the chimes three times, then try to settle and manage listening outward while imagining inward. A test. An exercise in patience and, eventually, if I’ve laid enough groundwork, a practice in developing the mind’s eye and also precious sensitivities like compassion and humor and wonder and curiosity at what it means to be a human in a hard world. It’s just stories, they might say. Is it? Stories make worlds. So I start with this first book. It is silly, sometimes absurd. But they love the voices I make and that the mean teacher sees justice (of a sort) and students fall out windows asleep and almost sell their toes and are right about the wrong things. Each character a child with their own uniqueness to offer — just like them.

Short chapters that do a lot of work. They capture and recapture attention page after page. Lots of laughs and silliness, a sign that books and words can be play and not just labors to get through. It does the trick, this book. Placed in the library when completed with the class, I’ve seen it with a front cover falling off and pages bent and fingerprinted with chip dust. Loved and used till it must be replaced. Again and again. And we are a little closer to loving reading and story as much as I do.

The Read Aloud Series is a reflection on the series of books I used to read aloud to my third grade students every year after lunch. The exact order and titles changed somewhat over the years, but these are the ones that were most beloved, both for the kids as listeners and for me as the read-aloud-reader. Many afternoons our 20-minute read aloud time would stretch into 25, 30, a few times even as long as 45 minutes, as the kids begged to hear more of a story, or we discussed what a character did, or I reread difficult passages, or we created family trees and plot diagrams on the board to keep track of it all. I can say that my gift as a teacher was, and still is, my enthusiasm for a good story, and these are the books that have brought me a great deal of joy in sharing with young readers over the years.