At the Mountain's Base

The beauty of a completely flexible schedule is that you can be, well, flexible.

This morning I received an urgent email from a first great teacher with the subject line, "HELP!"
She thought today was the day we were celebrating a big book birthday. Parents sent in homemade cookies, grapes and other snacks for the party.  But, our planned party is actually next week.  What to do?  "Can you come down at any time today to celebrate something?" 12:45 it was.

Fortunately, it didn't take me long to look through my F&Gs to find a book that celebrated its birthday yesterday. The gorgeous, poetic and thought-provoking-for-any-grade, At the Mountain's Base it was. And celebrate we did. Happy belated, Traci Sorell and Weshoyot Alvitre.  And check out the book's well deserved STARRED REVIEW from SLJ.

We read the book and talked about peace, family and Native Americans.  We sang "This Land is Your Land" (they knew the lyrics way better than I did!).  I brought down some yarn since it is "weaved" throughout the story and we glued a piece onto card stock in the shape of a square or circle.  Tomorrow they will draw their families inside the yarn frame.

"Don't forget we have to sing 'Happy Birthday!'" many of them reminded me.  Of course!

I love my job. And I especially love that my schedule allows me to squeeze in a book birthday at the last minute in between meeting first graders to critique Geisel contenders, helping 6th graders navigate through the overdrive app, Sora, read aloud to 5th graders daily at 2pm, introduce kinders to book exchange, plan book birthdays, author visits and... yeah, that was just today. Makes me so happy that I'm leaping...