The Wheel on the School

At last, we’ve finished The Wheel on the School.

The chapters are longer than we’ve typically tackled in a read-aloud: 20-25 pages or so. This means bedtimes have slid a bit later, and we’ve had just this one option (rather than this plus a picture book or two) each night for the whole of its fifteen chapters. It was well worth it.

I read this as a child, but I didn’t remember much beyond the basic storyline: it was about storks. Recently it was recommended in both For the Children’s Sake, and the activity guide that goes along with The Story of the World. I decided to give it a try.

As promised, it’s quite suspenseful. Lina, a little girl in the 6-student Shora school, reads an essay one day about a subject of interest to her: storks, and why storks no longer nest in Shora. It triggers an imaginative speculation that eventually draws the whole village into a plan to attract storks back to their rooftops.

This is a book that deals in big subjects: having a dream, and the courage to believe in it; cooperative enterprise; bridging age gaps; faith; nature; education; the sea. It gave us a glimpse of Dutch culture; every time we opened the book, I almost felt the salt spray and the chill of Shora. The character development is more leisurely and detailed than other single books we’ve tried as read-alouds, and the cast of characters encompasses all ages.

I loved hearing my daughters burst out laughing at the antics of Janus, the fisherman who’s lost both legs and begins to emerge from his shell of bitter isolation to become the children’s champion. I loved the way comparisons to people in this story have emerged in conversation more than once as we’ve been reading it. I loved the way the girls begged for another chapter each night, even after a fairly long session just to get through one chapter. I loved the story itself, which brought me (I admit it) to tears at times as I read. (”Here, I’ll take a turn, Mommy,” said my 8-year-old finally, reaching for the book.) And I loved the way that when we finished it, my 5-year-old said reflectively, “I was thinking last night: just one little story — one little story by that one little girl — turned into a whole plan.”