Once Upon an Ordinary School Day

This is one of my all time favorite books to teach with. I teach elementary school and it's a great way to get kids into writing. The illustrations are amazing and it's one of those books that not many people are familiar with, so the chances that they kids have heard it before are smal.

This is a great story about the power of music. A new teacher comes to school and introduces the "ordinary" children to music. Some of them love it, some of them don't but the main character falls in love with it. He imagines wonderful, colorfully drawn scenes inspired by what he hears. The music changes this ordinary boy's black and white world to color, a transition that is not lost on the reader. I loved that the book is honest about how music does not have the same transformative powers for everyone but how it does have the ability to touch people's lives. The illustrations are wonderful and the story is direct and quick to read. My 6 and 8 1/2 year olds really enjoy this book. One caveat - the word "pee" is used as part of the story, but if you don't like that, it is easy to skip it in the places it is used.

You've heard it over and over: one great teacher can make a difference in a kid's life. I never had such a teacher. This is probably why nobody writes stories about my childhood, spent idling away entire school years waiting for the rest of the class to catch up to me. Luckily, the "ordinary boy" in this tale gets jolted out of his zombie existence when Mr. Gee bursts into the class with an oddball assignment. Not all the students are up to the imaginative leaps and mental stretching he requires, of course. But Ordinary Boy will never be the same, and takes to the task with awed glee, as if flicking on a light to discover he was in a theme park instead of a closet. Though it takes place in Britain, this story could be yours, or your child's, as his drab, colorless world ignites into vivid, passionate sprays of color. Perhaps this story couldn't be told by an American, however, requiring as it does a lack of cynicism about public education.