Perfect

Back to school time over here in Michigan. I am loving the picture perfect classrooms, gorgeous bulletin boards, fabulous anchor charts, and perfectly adorable teachers that I am seeing all over Instagram and Facebook. We work hard getting those classrooms ready, and deserve to celebrate when they are ready and waiting for our new crop of students. Of course visions of picture perfect lessons and activities enjoyed by our picture perfect students are also dancing in our heads. I've always referred to this time as a shiny new year, but the truth is that the patina of the new year wears off pretty quickly. Real life and the day to day world of teaching takes over. Kids have picture perfect visions of their own for the year ahead too. This situation always makes me think of another of my favorite read-alouds for fourth and fifth graders, A Crooked Kind of Perfect. (affiliate link)

                                                                   
Meet Zoe. She dreams of becoming a concert pianist, a child prodigy who will play at Carnegie Hall, wearing a ballgown, a tiara, and long gloves. She tells us of her her dreams in a short opening chapter called "How It Was Supposed to Be". In the next short chapter (perhaps among the shortest chapters in history - three short sentences) "How It Is", we find that Zoe actually plays the organ. A "wheeze-bag Perfect -Tone D-60" that her dad impulse-bought at the mall. We learn that Dad is an agoraphobic and Mom is a workaholic. As we laugh a little at Zoe's description of her Dad's experiences with mail order courses from "Living Room University", her mother's demanding job as a Controller for the state, and Zoe's own disappointment in her organ lessons, we begin to make personal connections to the text.

Each of us has our own "How It Was Supposed To Be" and "How It Is". We have this dichotomy in our lives in general, and in specific events like the start of school. Some great conversations followed our read-aloud sessions about how each of deals with our "How It Is" and adjustments we make to "How It Was Supposed to Be".  Zoe goes on to tell more about her typical pre-teen life. Events like arriving at lunch to find that her best friend Emma now has a new best friend. We can feel you, Zoe. Been there.

As we read on, we explore the theme found in the pages of this book. Linda Urban, the author, is a fabulous writer, and many of the descriptions told in Zoe's voice are hilarious. Zoe seriously becomes our friend for life. Her angst is our angst, and her unique and witty way of looking at life touches us at the soul level. As Zoe takes works her organ-playing way through "The Hits of the Seventies" to prepare for the Perform-O-Rama, your kids will be singing along to "Green Acres" and "Forever in Blue Jeans", babe. I promise you will love sharing this book with your class, and it will be with you forever.

I always look back fondly on this early-in-the-year read-aloud and watch how it has affected my students' attitudes. As Zoe and the cast of characters in her life all find their own way to a new perfect, a crooked kind of perfect, one that works and still makes them way beyond happy, so do we! We start the year in our perfect classroom, with our perfect visions for a perfect year, and find ways to deal with the crooked way it all turns out - our own crooked kind of perfect!

Need a way to justify having this much fun in Reading class? I have created a CCSS linked (complete with "I Can" statements for each lesson) Interactive Notebook resource with summaries and nine sessions of lessons for this book. There are thinking questions, fun Interactive Notebook pages to slip right into whatever IN you like to use, and a short reading log to use as assessment. The whole crookedly perfect package! Check it out here:

Hoping you and your own sweet students will find your crookedly perfect way to a great year!