A Pile of Rocks

Tomorrow I will read at Galveston Elementary School to two different second grade classrooms. I do this every week as a literacy advocate through the BookPALS program. Tomorrow will be the last time I read before the students go on break for the Christmas holidays.

I will be reading Everybody Needs a Rock and afterwards, each student will choose a rock from a large bag to take home.

This past summer, my husband, Kevin and I picked up rocks from a beach in California for the specific purpose of giving them away and because we each read to two classrooms (he reads to 6th graders), we picked up over 100 rocks that day.

Here is a selection from my journal, written after I read this story last year.

The children impatiently waited their turn as they gathered around the small table where I sat in a second-grade classroom at Galveston Elementary School. In front of me was a pile of rocks. Some smooth. Some rough. One with a single black stripe running through it. Another with pink flecks.

The children had been instructed to choose one rock to keep as their own. Rocks were carefully examined. Rejected. Considered. Never was choosing a rock such serious business.

"I'm counting to ten and then you have to decide," announced the teacher.

One boy tentatively put a round, brownish rock to his nose. "It smells like the mountains," he declared. Copying, a girl quickly sniffed her rock. "Mine smells like the ocean."

I smiled. They had been listening. I had just finished reading, Everybody Needs a Rock, by Byrd Baylor and we had discussed some of the ten rules for rock-choosing as outlined in the story, including, "Always sniff a rock. Some kids can tell by sniffing whether a rock came from an ocean or from the mountain where wind and sun touched it. . . ."

That day, I knew I had connected with my room of students.

Galations 5:6b says, "... The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."

As a reader at a public elementary school, I rarely have the chance to verbally talk about my faith in Christ. But I CAN express my faith through love. All it takes is a little time. A good book. And maybe, just maybe, a small pile of rocks.