This will encourage the child who feels like a failure and the teacher who cares. Trisha isn't idealized: we see her messy and desperate, poring over her books. As always she tells the story with intense emotion: no understatement here reading is "torture." The big line-and-watercolor illustrations are bright with color and theatrical gesture, expressing the child's happiness with her grandparents in a family of readers, her fear and loneliness in the classroom ("she hated hated hated school"), her anguish when the kids jeer at her in the schoolyard, and her joy when finally she reads the words on the page ("she was happy, so very happy"). "That little girl was me," Polacco says in a final note. You’ll have everything you need to deliver engaging interactive read aloud lessons based on this story. Who would believe that this gifted storyteller had started off with a serious learning disability? From kindergarten on, Trisha gets attention because she can draw but she hides the fact that she can't read-all she sees on the page are "wiggling shapes" -until her fifth-grade teacher discovers Trisha's problem, gets her special help, and sets her free. It includes resource recommendations, free teaching ideas, and information about the book. Like many of Polacco's picture-book stories, this one is autobiographical.
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