Book 3, Clementine

This petite book by Marla Frazee shows that girls can be Bad Kids, too. Clementine is wildly distracted and wildly creative and caring and silly and so youthful and innocent. She is a little bit manic pixie dream girl, but in a mostly harmless and very childlike way. Because Clementine is a child. She makes so many mistakes and is so much herself that through the opening chapters the kids at first are confused by her:  cutting off all her friend’s hair, then her own, then trying to fix it with red permanent marker, eating peas with a toothbrush, naming her pets after cosmetics products. Clementine also deals with loss and longing in a way that gently opens that conversation for the kids. It’s very silly and also disarming and real. 

Clementine creates a way into building curiosity and patience for a character, into experiencing the truth of the narrative before the protagonist does, and then waiting to see when and how she finally catches on. It sheds some light on how to love our friends and family members, even the most maddening ones, with generosity and curiosity. It shows how we can treat a Bad Kid with gentleness and acceptance and humor. Because we all make mistakes, and we have all wished to be embraced for who we are, and not just tolerated.  

The Read Aloud Series is a review of 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 15-minute read aloud time would stretch into 20, 30, sometimes 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 diagrammed family trees and plot lines for them. 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.