With poetic rhyming and vivid illustrations, Andrea Beaty and David Roberts do it again with the latest addition to the Questioneers series. Miss Greer, the teacher we have come to love has a class full of characters, Ada the scientist, Rosie the engineer, Iggy the architect, Sofia the future president, and now Aaron the illustrator.
Each child in the class holds a unique gift which Miss Greer somehow manages to foster in beautifully respectful and honest ways…ways we all strive to accomplish with our students.
Our latest friend, Aaron, is quite the artist and can create beauty with his illustrations and his words but he struggles to read the words written by others. Aaron wants to read “with all of his heart…and try though he might ‘why can’t I do it? why is it so hard?'”
This is one of the first books that I have come across with a child wanting to learn to read but struggling…my heart leapt with joy as I shared this story with my kindergarten students, all in their own place on their journey of learning to read. This story provided opportunities for windows and mirrors for my students in their reading identities as well as who they are as people and as learners.
Miss Greer’s class is “place full of beauty for one and for all.” Beaty and Roberts create the opportunity for many goosebump moments with this class they’re creating. As I turned to the end pages of this book, my eyes filled with tears reading the note from the author.
The entire book is written in a font titled Dyslexie…a font created for people with dyslexia with the intent to make reading easier for them to learn. The font itself is thicker on the bottom and longer in size allowing the letters to be more easily distinguishable and making the top and bottom of the letter easier to determine.
I am not someone with dyslexia and I know there is a lot of debate and conversation around this topic. But to think there are tools like this that could help in some way to ease the struggle for some of our readers, well, that made my kindergarten teacher heart melt a little bit.
If you would like to learn more about this font, you can go to dyslexiefont.com.
