More Adventures of Little Mikey

By Anthony Harris

More Adventures of Little Mikey is the second in a series of chapter books, featuring Little Mikey and his schoolmates. The first book in the series, The Adventures of Little Mikey, highlighted character traits that improve social emotional learning (SEL). The impetus for creating this series is to provide an additional tool to support parents, teachers, counselors, and other educators as they engage students in social emotional learning, which is regarded by educators as foundational and critical to the academic success of students.
More Adventures of Little Mikey continues to illustrate the importance of children displaying strong character traits such as kindness, respect, generosity, fairness, compassion, unselfishness, and self-awareness. At the end of each chapter, there are several questions that encourage children to think more about those character traits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662913754

Book preview

Chapter 1

New school year

It was the first day of a brand-new school year. Little Mikey, whose real name is Michael Harris, sat at his desk on the front row. He wore new jeans, black high-top sneakers, and a Star Wars T-shirt. With his hands, he drummed out a slow beat on his new Oakland Raiders book bag that set atop his desk. He nervously looked to his left, to his right, straight ahead, and behind him, hoping to spot his best friend, Ricardo Gonzalez. They didn’t see each other the entire summer because Ricardo was in California, visiting his Uncle Tio and his Aunt Tia. Little Mikey spent his summer doing chores and running errands for his neighbors, which earned him $110. He also helped his mom and dad paint his bedroom, which changed from all white to all green. A couple of times, he and his dad went fishing and camping.

Little Mikey was hoping that Ricardo would be in his classroom again. Ever since the first grade, he and Ricardo have had the same teacher and always did fun things together, such as watching movie videos, playing computer games, and playing football.

Little Mikey wanted to make sure Ricardo would sit in the empty desk next to him. So, whenever someone tried to sit next to him, he said, Sorry. This desk is taken. He’ll be back in a few minutes.

Every time someone walked into Mr. Jones’ classroom, Little Mikey got excited. A wide grin came across his face, but it slowly went away when he saw that it was not Ricardo. Little Mikey got even sadder when he thought about how much he would miss Ricardo if he were in a different teacher’s classroom, in a different school or in another town. Maybe he was still in California and in a new school there, he thought. Little Mikey began to ask himself: If Ricardo doesn’t come back, who will I play with? Who will I talk to? Who will I eat lunch with? What if I never see my best friend again?

The bell rang, and Mr. Jones got up from his desk, walked to the door, and was starting to close it.

Wait! Wait! Wait! the voice yelled out.

Little Mikey recognized the voice. His face came alive again with a huge grin as he saw Ricardo run past Mr. Jones and into the classroom. Ricardo stopped and looked around for a place to sit.

Ricardo! Ricardo! yelled Little Mikey excitedly.

He waved his hands and pointed to the empty desk next to his.

Ricardo was nearly out of breath. (Why was he out of breath?)

Little Mikey. Hey. Thanks for holding a seat for me, Ricardo said.

Man, am I glad to see you, Little Mikey said as the two friends gave each other a high five.

After the bell stopped ringing, everyone stopped talking. Mr. Jones stood in front of the class, and in a loud and cheerful voice said, Good morning, boys and girls!

Good morning, Mr. Jones, the children said together, also loud and happy.

"Welcome to another school year. I am looking forward to being your teacher this year. I believe that you will enjoy being in my class and that you will learn lots of new things. In fact, we will all learn, and we’ll have tons of fun while we are learning."

Little Mikey looked at Ricardo, nodded and smiled. They had heard good things about Mr. Jones, that he was funny and liked to show kids how to do lots of cool stuff like build robots, create animated computer games, and make funny faces on a computer.

But first, we are going to spend today and tomorrow talking about what you did over the summer. Before you talk about it, however, you are going to write it down first. So, I want you to take out a sheet of paper and a pencil from your bookbag. Once you have done that, please look at me, quietly. Don’t start writing until I tell you.

The sounds of chatter, bookbags being unzipped, zipped and paper being taken out of notebooks could be heard throughout the room.

Okay, boys and girls. Quiet time, now. Put your pencils on your desk and look at me.

Little Mikey was whispering to Ricardo and was tapping his desk with his pencil.

Michael Harris, are you listening? Please put your pencil down and look at me.

Oh. No, sir. I wasn’t listening. I’m sorry, Mr. Jones. It won’t happen again. And you can just call me Little Mikey if you want to. I don’t mind.