Kindness and Building a Community of Library Learners

This week, in grades 3-5, we focused on kindness and building a community of learners in the library. I thought this was important as we embark on a new year with interactive media spots and a new self checkout system.  Our read-aloud was Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson. In the story, a new girl, Maya, arrives to school with a tattered coat and worn shoes. She smiles and tries to make friends with the narrator and others at the school, but they all shun her. After a kindness lesson by their teacher, the narrator realizes that she has been mean, feels badly, and vows to make friends with Maya. Maya, however, never returns…. she ends up moving to a different town.
Woodson is brilliant in her simple, eloquent way of telling the story, but I wasn't sure how it would go over as a read aloud. It was a huge success. Every student listened intently and you could see them thinking about how it applied to their own lives. When someone raised their hand at the end and said, "This story doesn't make sense," I got nervous that he didn't understand what happened. But, when I questioned him further, he said that "stories are supposed to end happily." I ended up using this as my focus question for the rest of the 3rd-5th graders that heard the story. I asked, "Was the real ending different from how you thought the story was going to end?" Students overwhelmingly thought that the narrator would end up being nice to Maya before the story ended. Woodson does an excellent job of capturing everyday bullying, resolving the conflict within the protagonist, but leaving a heartbreaking feeling at the end because the narrator doesn't have a chance to remedy the situation. I think it's a great start to a year of inspiring literature!