Bookmarked In My Brain

This past weekend I went to the library in the Lindquist center and started looking through all the children's books. I was overwhelmed at first seeing there were shelves upon shelves of children's books. There were many different genres, lengths, styles of writing, etc. I pretty much decided to look at the cover of the books and see what looked interesting to me. I know, I know your not supposed to judge a book by it's cover... but what can I say? There were so many to choose from. So i grabbed a handful off the shelf and just took them home with me to read. I read a few that were very cute and fun to read, some more than others. I found one that stuck out to me more than the others. One I want to bookmark in my brain so that I can use it in my future classroom.

The book was titled, Jake Starts School. It was written by Michael Wright. The book is generally for ages 4-6 but I plan to use this book for any and all ages of my students. The book is all about Jake starting his first day of school. Jake like most kids on their first day is nervous... so nervous, that he does not want to leave his mom or dad. Because Jake wouldn't let go of his mom and dad they had to stay with him during the day. Jake wasn't able to do any of the fun things the other kids in his class got to do because he was attached to his parents all day. Until the end of the day that is. Mrs. Moore was going to read a story to the class at the end of the day about a dog, named Fred. Jake had a dog named Fred and spoke up about it. Mrs. Moore asked if Jake would hold the book while she read it to the class, and then he finally let go of his parents and felt happy he was at school. Jake was finally able to let go of all his nervousness and enjoy his year in classroom number 1.

I loved this story because it was light hearted and I think it's a great story for the first day of classes. No matter how old you get, you can still get nervous for your first day of classes. And who doesn't want to hear about another child's success and how they managed to get through their first day.