The picture book below was written to encourage young children to enjoy reading. I decided to use five- to seven-year-olds from the nearby Robert Taylor Public Housing Projects to illustrate the different verses. Because Chicago had an annual strike just about every year, when I began teaching at Farren next to the Robert Taylor Public Housing Projects (at the time, the largest public housing in the world), I established a not-for-profit, The RAMP (Reading and Math Program), so my students would not miss any school. After the strike ended, I decided to keep the program going as an academic after-school program, started writing grants, hired some local teenagers to help out, and discovered I had an aptitude for grant writing. The Geraldine Dodge Foundation paid me a thousand dollars for the manuscript and then sent me the entire press run.
Ken Satterfield, a librarian at the Missouri River Regional Library, has produced a recording of his expert reading of the book:
