Patricia Polacco Visits MMCL

MMCL recently welcomed the beloved children's book author and illustrator Patricia Polacco. Patricia has published over 35 books, many of which are autobiographical. As someone who has a learning disability herself and who wrote about it extensively in her books, she is one of our students' favorite authors.

Excitement for her visit had been building since the start of the school year. The lower elementary and elementary divisions had spent two months studying her life and had read many of her books in their classrooms.

When the day of her visit finally arrived, the students could barely contain their excitement as they filed into the Meeting Room to meet her. The Fox room was so excited that they baked a Thunder Cake for her (for those of you who don't know, Patricia wrote a book about baking a "thunder cake" to help her get over her fear of thunderstorms). She talked to the students about the books she had written, her family, and her learning disability. Born into a family of storytellers, Patricia spent her childhood listening to the stories of her grandmother. Her grandmother called them "fire stories," because they were told around the fire in the living room. She loved being read to more than anything else and explained how in her family, when a child reached the first grade, she would stand in the middle of a circle of her relatives. A book would be placed in her hands and honey poured on its cover. The child would then taste the honey on the book. This special ritual would associate learning with sweetness forever in the child's mind.

Unfortunately learning was not very sweet for Patricia, as it hasn't been for many of our students. No matter how hard she tried, she could not read; the letters, she said,

just looked like a bunch of lines on a page. She told our students that she understood exactly what they are going through and that they should never think of themselves as stupid. Patricia didn't learn to read until she was 14 years old, and only then with the help of a very special teacher. She wrote about that teacher in Thank You Mr. Falker, and shared with our students the story of him.

She also read from The Keeping Quilt, which follows a quilt through four generations of her family. As a special treat, she brought in the very quilt that she wrote about in the book, the one that was made out of the clothes her great-grandmother Anna wore on the journey from Russia to America. The students gasped when she brought it out-they couldn't believe they were seeing the very quilt they had read about in their classes!

Patricia then took questions and answers from the students until it was time for dismissal. Before we ended, she invited students to shake her hand on their way out. A relative six generations removed had shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln. By shaking her hand, then, they would be "shaking the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand" of President Lincoln. It was an absolute pleasure to watch the joy on our students' faces as they listened to Patricia. Her stories about her family and her struggles with a learning disability moved all of us, and we are so grateful that she made the time to visit. We would like to thank Andrea Pinkney, a MMCL parent and Scholastic Trade's Vice-President, for making this event possible.