<p>D’s First Grade Teacher involved her own family in the classroom of a public school. I doubt she thought about the message to students. More likely, she was just pulling in the available free resources to enrich her classroom program.</p>
<p>The message was that learning is an all-family pleasure, so that First Grade echoed our own home life. Instead of a cold “bump” between home and school, D experienced a daily transition from one family-strong setting to another.</p>
<p>Specifically: the teacher’s mother wrote and illustrated children’s books, and came in monthly to field-test characters and new storylines in the classroom. In the course of a school year, D saw stories change with editing, came to know a “real author” and became a wonderful writer herself. </p>
<p>The teacher’s husband was a carpenter. She had him build a huge ship in the center of the room that was her classroom library. He built racks to display books at child’s height, and benches inside the ship. It was magical, and put reading at the physical and emotional center of the classroom.</p>