Hi everyone,
Saturday marked the official publication date of The Fluency Development Lesson, Closing the Reading Gap, (Benchmark Educational Company) my collaboration with LYNNE KULICH and TIM RASINSKI. We’ve been eager for this moment to arrive. Books are in the warehouse and orders are being shipped. Even before now, preorders have kept the book well rated in Language Arts Teaching Materials and Education Books. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
We cover a wide range of themes in this book to offer young readers a rich menu of reading material. Some poems are humorous. Others, like this one, provide more serious thoughts to ponder.
Mountain Climbers
Old, frail, she sits,
cane propped against her chair.
Sitting by that window,
sunlight streams on her wispy hair
in the reading room each day.
You can always find her there
with the same book she always reads.
The book is about mountains
and those who climb them, risking all,
betting their lives on a rope
as inch by inch they scale a wall,
with a bad fall below
if luck goes wrong and they should fall.
Brave explorers, brave needs.
When she was a girl she dreamed –
back when she was limber, and nine –
a day would come when she
would scale mountains in her prime.
A cane is now her sign
of a brave old woman with a mountain to climb –
to risk the fall, her bravest deed.
(c) 2024 The Fluency Development Lesson, Closing the Reading Gap. All rights reserved.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 
Beautiful poem, David. I see myself in your words!
Thank you, Su. The poem is for all of us, when we come to that time of life. I hope we can talk about such cycles with our young readers.