The other classrooms at Campton were along the main corridor of the school. Mrs. Mattson’s fourth grade room was tucked midway between the library and the cafeteria. Maybe it designed to be a place for choir/band/orchestra practice? Unlike the other classrooms the space had no lockers for coats and boots and no sink where we could up clean up after messy art projects. Its small size and location made it seem cozy.
I recall magical afternoons while we listened on the installment plan, one or two chapters per session. Sometimes a book would take weeks. Our teacher often chose thick books. The intimidating page count might keep us from checking these books out of our school or public library. Not wanting to wait until another afternoon to hear what happened next, we would sometimes beg her to continue reading and, because she was easygoing, she sometimes agreed. Mrs. Mattson’s eclectic mixture of fiction and non-fiction introduced me to genres that I might not have otherwise read, and by the end of the year my favorite characters were Dr. Doolittle and Marie Curie.
She encouraged us to read on our own, too. Each week Mrs. M would lead us around the corner from our room to the Campton School library. Every month we’d receive a newsletter from the Scholastic Book Club to order slim, inexpensive paperbacks for our personal collection. Our purchases helped earn free, bonus books for our classroom.
And she instituted a contest. Mrs. M. gave us each a sheet of paper with the picture of a block house that she had hand drawn and copied with the ditto machine in the school’s office. After printing our names at the top we thumb-tacked the sheets onto our classroom’s bulletin board. After reading a book we would use crayon to color one rectangle, starting from the bottom of our house, and write down the book’s title in a column to the side of the paper. The first one to color in every block of their house won the contest. I did my best, but Harold read a slew of books. He beat us to the top of the chimney first. Harold, did you win a prize?
Some of the books I checked out of the Campton library in 4th, 5th and 6th grades to read at home:
A series about the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron
A series with the main character Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
A series with the main character Mr. Pickerel
A book about Johnny Tremaine by Esther Forbes
All of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books
Landmark biographies about Alexander Graham Bell, Luther
Burbank and George Washington Carver
Books I checked out from the library (at least once) but for some reason never managed to read:
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A book about a horse named Smokey
Fairy Tale Collections of various colors: green, red, yellow, etc.
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