Ask Ms. Amy what she remembers most vividly from her own fourth-grade year, and she’ll tell you it wasn’t the math facts or the spelling tests—it was the feeling of racing back inside after recess, sweaty and breathless, only to fall completely silent the moment her teacher opened a book.
“We’d come in from tetherball or running around where we weren’t supposed to—classic ’80s, ’90s recess stuff,” she says with a laugh. “But once we sat down and she started reading, no one made a sound. She held our attention. It was just magic.”
Her teacher read the greats:
The Great Gilly Hopkins.
The Indian in the Cupboard.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Stories that transported a room full of grass-stained, out-of-breath fourth graders into lives far from their own.
One book in particular stayed with her: The Great Gilly Hopkins.
And this year, as a fourth-grade teacher herself, Ms. Amy brought that same magic into her own classroom.
Reading Gilly With a New Generation
When she read Gilly Hopkins aloud to her students this fall, her class loved it. The book, written in the ’70s, includes outdated language and difficult themes, and Ms. Amy didn’t shy away from those moments.
“We talked about it. It opened up really meaningful conversations,” she says. “And then the kids were fascinated to see how the 2015 movie updated parts of the story while keeping Gilly’s fierce personality.”
The heart of the book—the thing that captured Ms. Amy as a child and captivated her students now—is Gilly’s transformation.
At first, Gilly is all edges: angry, prickly, determined to push everyone away. She gets in fights, refuses to brush her hair, and even writes a cruel poem about her teacher. But slowly, through kindness and consistency, she begins to soften. She finds family and belonging with her foster mother, Trotter; a younger foster sibling; and a blind neighbor, Mr. Randolph. She learns that love comes in many forms.
“For a fourth grader, watching a character shed her anger and find her people is powerful,” Ms. Amy reflects. “It’s such a tender age—they’re figuring out who they are, what home means, what love looks like.”
Full-Circle Magic
And then, in a moment that feels like something out of a book itself, Ms. Amy realized just how much the story still meant to her.
“I went home and immediately bought it on Amazon,” she admits. “As soon as I saw the cover, I remembered what it felt like to hear it read aloud. Fourth grade was my jam.”
Now she’s passing that experience on—creating the same hush-falls-over-the-room magic for her students that once meant so much to her.
Some stories stay with us.
Some teachers change us.
And some read-aloud moments become part of who we are.