By Patricia Polacco
Patricia Polacco's true story of the special class other students mocked as 'the junkyard,' and the teacher who called them Wonders and set them to building a model airplane that would actually fly.
Trisha changes schools hoping for a clean start, a place where nobody knows that reading comes hard for her. On the first day she finds out her new room is the special class, the one other students sneer at and call 'the junkyard.' Her teacher, Mrs. Peterson, uses a different word for it. Junk isn't garbage, she tells them; it's good material nobody has looked at yet, and they are her Junkyard Wonders. She sorts them into groups, tells them they're geniuses, and gives them a real job: gather scrap and scavenged parts and build a model airplane that flies. Trisha makes friends who each learn or move or speak differently, and each turn out to be good at something — Thom, Jody, Ravanne, and Gibbie, a small boy with the biggest dream of the whole group. One of them dies before the year is out, and the class finishes and flies the plane in his honor.
This is Polacco's own childhood, and it's the book to hand a teacher who took the class nobody wanted and told them they were extraordinary, then made them prove it. The whole story runs on one teacher refusing the label the world stuck on a child. It's just as strong for a child on the receiving end of a label, who needs to hear that the group you got sorted into says nothing about who you are. It goes deeper than most picture books and earns its ending. It also carries a real loss, so it wants a grown-up reading alongside rather than a child taking it to bed alone.