Lovely Little Shelf

The Wayside School Series, by Louis Sachar

I LOVED these books!  I had forgotten all about them, then I was clicking through Goodreads and saw one of the covers and was taken back to elementary school in a flash.

I remember all the funny little things about the school: One classroom on each story, no 13th story, all these funny little things.  Also, all the funny kids:  that kid who got totally fixated on the pigtails of the girl in front of him, the kid who got stuck to his seat with bubblegum, the girl who everyone loved but she was obsessed with ice cream…. I could go on and on.  This was kind of just a collection of short stories about these quirky little kids who went to school in this crazy building.

The sequels were great too, and were a lot of the same.

One thing that really sticks out to me is Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School.

To say that I hated math in school is an understatement.  To this day, I’m not a big fan, but in elementary school it actually made me mad.  I was always a “smart kid” in everything except for math and I think that it always just annoyed me that I had to try so hard. This book, though… I loved it.  It was all these math problems and logic problems for kids.  This is the only time in my memory that math really was fun.  No one even had to tell me to do it… I did it voluntarily.  Crazy, right?

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