Ramona ~ reading, reporting, and riding the bus

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 ~ by Beverly Cleary, 1981, children's book (Oregon), rated 10 of 10.  Click here to see what I posted yesterday about the book and the author.  I've read the book and love Ramona even more than I did before.  I like her interest in reading and even that she had excellent reasons for her choices, including the choice of words:

"Ramona decided that she preferred Sustained Silent Reading to D.E.A.R. because it sounded more grown-up.  When time came for everyone to Drop Everything And Read, she sat quietly doing her Sustained Silent Reading" (p. 22).

Ramona had an idea

"Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea." (The quote and the drawing are both from page 78.  I photographed my Kindle to capture her artistic endeavor.)

Ramona's idea was to "sell" her classmates on the book by using masks to make herself and two friends into dancing cats, like in a commercial.  So she's making what she needs for the "show" she has in mind for her oral book report.

Riding the bus

Ramona was excited she could now ride the school bus alone, because she was a big girl in third grade.  Did you ride a school bus to elementary school?  I know we walked to and from school in the 1940s, even though we lived about a miles from the school, and I don't remember any school buses at all.  

We moved about two blocks outside of my school district when I was in third grade, so my first-grade brother and I rode a regular city bus for the last six or eight weeks of school in 1949.  I was in charge of getting us on the bus in each direction.  I turned nine a few weeks after we moved, and my brother was still six years old.  We even had to get off and transfer on a busy city street, both ways.  Our school was two block off the first bus route, and when we got off the second bus at home, we still had another block to walk.  That fall, we went to a different grammar school, close enough to walk there and back each day.  Most of the time, he walked with his friends, and I walked with mine.