Mrs. Anderson was the best teacher ever. She encouraged my love of reading. When I entered her class from Miss Jaderman’s class I was initially placed in the lower reading group with a different 6th grade teacher but somehow Mrs. Anderson knew I was a good reader and brought me to her reading group. I don’t think we used typical reading books in her class, but we read real books — and she read to us. After reading each of the books we would often do a special project as a class. For instance, after reading The Hobbit we made a hobbit hole out of chicken wire and papier-mâché. After reading Wind in the Willows we put on a play and presented it to the school. We even did the screen writing ourselves — turning the book into scenes. I excelled at that. We may or may not have put so much effort into the other subjects, but we sure had fun with language arts.

Reading Mrs. Anderson’s comments makes me smile. I don’t know that I knew she considered me a “favorite”. It took me years to overcome my shyness — and I still fall into it now and then.