Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary

Ramona the Pest was written by Beverly Cleary in 1968.

The engaging tale of young Ramona Quimby's first days in kindergarten, Ramona the Pest takes a pint-sized perspective on the trials and delights of beginning school. Ramona can't wait to learn all the important things. But she's disappointed when her teacher can't fill in missing parts of story lines, such as how Mike Mulligan (of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel) went to the bathroom while digging the basement of the town hall. Nonetheless, Ramona loves her teacher, and loves going to school in spite of the torments--having to wear hand-me-down boots, for example, or having to (sometimes) suppress the urge to pull on another girl's "boing-boing" curls.

1 comment:

  1. WOW! I remember this from my elementary school days. Our teacher introduced us to the collection of Beverly Cleary writings by reading to us each day in class after lunch. This daily routine caused a lot of us students to want to learn more about Ramona, Beezus, Henry, Ribsy and the rest of the Klickitat street characters.

    Each time I visited the school library, I made sure to include at least one Beverly Cleary offering in my selections and as a result I learned about the offshoots of her earlier works such as Ralph The Mouse & Mr. Mischief himself... Otis Spofford.

    In conclusion, It was works like this that is responsible for my willingness to learn more and thus catapulted my reading,comprehension & spelling skills as a young adolescent in elementary school. I feel blessed to have grown up in an era when public school teachers cared and there was no such thing as the internet. Books and educational PBS programs were all we had.

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