The winding road to Jewell Parker Rhodes coming to CES

This is a "Where's Jewell?" picture

The most lovely, inspiring, joyous, huggable Jewell Parker Rhodes visited our school on Thursday. Her aura and magic is still lingering.  I imagine it will hang over us for a long time to come.

This post is not just a recap of our day, but a history of our relationship with Jewell...

It All Started with Sugar in 2013

Rewind three years and it all started with a Sugar book group for the 2014 Newbery project.  Look!  I even found the photos from our Skype with Jewell!  We have loved her ever since.

And now these kids are in 8th grade!  It's crazy how time flies...

Fast Forward to Late Winter/Spring 2016

We are so fortunate that we received arcs of Towers Falling through the Little Brown Faculty Lounge.  Mr. Reischer read it as a book group and both he and the students loved it.  Then I read it and loved it. Then Mrs. Warland read it and then....and then...and everyone who has read it since has loved it. Even our custodian picked up a copy on his break starting a few weeks ago.  I heard he just finished it.

A few pictures from our Skype in April with Jewell:

Here Mr. Reischer is giving feedback to Jewell

   

This Week

Jewell dazzled us this week as we welcomed and embraced her in our CES community for a few short hours this Thursday.  And she was a true sport about it, too!  Just moments after her toes felt the red carpet, I swept her into the office to have her say good morning on the announcements.  That's when she shared to our whole school community that in November she will be a grandmother to a little girl named Clara.  We are all so happy for her.

At our school wide assembly, we introduced our theme for the year, "We can be heroes" which came from Towers Falling.  We sat Jewell right in the front so she could watch it all.  To kick it off, Mrs. Golden's first graders sang an awesome song about heroes.  Next, we all loved hearing about the heroes of the students in Mrs. Kelliher's class.  We learned about the circle lesson in Towers Falling from Mr. Morse's class.  Mr. Reischer's class performed a great skit teaching us the important lesson on how we can all be heroes and all the fifth graders sang  a beautiful rendition of, "This Land is Your Land."  

Mr. Reischer's class skit*

Mr. Morse's class did the circles from Towers*

Mrs. Pryde's first graders came up and shared a timeline of her life.  Then Jewell and I did a little Q and A and that's when everyone in the room fell in love with her!  Silly me, I didn't even give her the questions in advance, but you would never know! She answered them so eloquently, you would have thought she had days to prepare.

                            

                                        Mrs. Pryde's class timeline*

Do you think this shirt was worn on purpose?

This is your life, Jewell!

Each 4th grade class researched and
created a Jewell Parker Rhodes from A-Z book*

For more pictures from that day, check it out here:  SCHODACK FLICKER for JEWELL (All pictures with an * are from this set.  Thank you Jason McCord!  I couldn't take many pictures myself!)

Jewell boarded her plane for California at noon.  She was with us for such a short time but boy did it make an impact.  People were talking about it the whole afternoon and next day.  Thank you, Jewell and Little Brown for bringing us all together!

Ms. Martin, Mrs. Hanna and Mrs. Brewer's third graders are loving Sugar.
They made this welcome sign for Jewell to hang by the red carpet!

I hope I have given the day what it deserves.  We love Jewell and were so thrilled to have her visit our school. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.  We look forward to collaborating throughout the year and more! xoxo