By Mikaela STONE
Read Across America Day typically occurs on the birthday of Dr. Seuss – March 2. However, at La Crescenta Elementary School librarian Carole Mulder celebrated the magic of reading all week long by selecting a series to spotlight. This year she and Suzanne Savage, the school’s “resident Ms. Frizzle” presented the series “The Magic School Bus” by Joanna Cole, which features Ms. Frizzle, a delightfully eccentric elementary school teacher who takes her class on field trips on her magic school bus. The bus can shrink to microscopic levels, fly through space and even travel in time, allowing students to explore the workings of the human body, various animal ecosystems and the water cycle.
By choosing a non-fiction focused series, Mulder hoped to get students excited about science. She decorated the library so that students entered through the magic school bus and also erected informational science posters that provided diagrams such as the parts of a flower and how an electric field works, referencing the book “The Magic School Bus and The Electric Field trip.”
In the back of the library, Mulder set up a lab complete with microscopes, flowers in a food coloring experiment and examples of concepts such as friction and inertia. Mulder even dressed up as Ms. Frizzle.
“[Read across America is] an opportunity to go really big to get kids excited about books and immerse them in reading,” she said.
She wanted students to feel as though they were transported to an exciting land as she highlighted the author and the lessons learned from the books.
Author Joanna Cole wrote more than 250 books over the course of her life, most of them focused on making science accessible to kids and explaining how the world works.