Ezra Jack Keats is one of my favorite authors and illustrators.
His book The Snowy Day is the first book I loved.
We gave Zeke the first name Peter because of the main character in that wonderful, beautiful story.
Keats wrote and illustrated another book I love titled Regards to the Man in the Moon.
It’s about two kids who make a rocket out of things in a junk yard.
They christen it Imagination I and blast off from Earth into outer space.
Two of my favorite pages have beautiful collages of the planets in our solar system with the words, “The floated past strange and wondrous things…and on through worlds no one had ever seen before.”
As I look at those collages and read those words, it occurs to me that teaching is like flying in Imagination I.
Every day, I get to see strange and wondrous things.
Today I saw a child fall and scrape his knee on the blacktop.
Every 4th grader around him lifted him up, dusted him off, got a band aid for his boo boo and offered their shoulders to catch his tears.
Strange and wondrous, for sure.
It filled my heart with hope.
I get to work in and write about a world few people have seen before, a public school classroom.
(It is a world, btw, and a joyful, wonderful, chaotic one at Christmas time for sure)
We had a special day today.
Astronomy Day!
If you know me well, you know I’m a NASA nerd.
I got to help 9 and 10 year olds hold the solar system in their hands.
I got to hold them in my heart, as I get to do as a public school teacher.
I’m thankful for that.
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