Saving the Kilda Street Zoo

By M. W. Neely, Nohely and Amargosa Cougar

Vagas is a native of Pondera. She was born there and has spent her entire life in the little town. It is a sleepy gathering of several thousand people near the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in central California. The residents are very different than in most California towns. They rarely hurry anywhere. They seem to have all the time in the world. Most of the businesses depend on tourists and travelers passing through. There are always new faces, which will probably not be seen again in the stores and restaurants. Oddly dressed outsiders wander up and down the main street stretching their legs after driving all day.

The two motels at the north and south ends of town always fill up as the sun begins to set each evening. Weekends and especially holidays are very busy times in Pondera.

The Pondera town zoo has always been part of Vagas life too, at least as far back as she can remember. She and Midori have spent many wonderful days there watching the various animals.

It isnt a big zoolike in a city. The entrance is on Kilda Street. There is a tall brown adobe type of wall across the front with evenly spaced windows on both sides of the opening where the ticket booth stands.

Theres a sign on the front of the booth with the hours of operation and $2.00 general admission in big letters on it. Children under the age of twelve get in for $1.00. Kids under the age of six get in free.

The ticket booth is one of those that has a thick pane of glass with a round hole in it to talk through and a square cut-out near the bottom for collecting payment and dispensing tickets. In that booth is usually an elderly lady named Mary who has worked there selling tickets for as long as Vagas can remember.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477101803

M. W. Neely

Roxanne Christine Neely (Roxy) Ms. Neely is a graduate of California State University, East Bay – 2012 with a B.A. in International Studies and TEFL. Roxy is widely traveled. She is fluent in English and Farsi. She is also studying to become conversant in Hebrew and Arabic.

Book preview

Saving the Kilda Street Zoo

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M. W. Neely and his students

Saving the Kilda Street Zoo

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Illustration by Nohely

By

Michael W. Neely—and his students

Copyright © 2012 by M. W. Neely.

Cover Art—Amargosa Cougar—2003 by M. W. Neely

Library of Congress Control Number:                  2012907872

ISBN:            Hardcover                            978-1-4771-0179-7

                      Softcover                              978-1-4771-0178-0

                      Ebook                                   978-1-4771-0180-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

112678

Contents

Introduction to the Story

Chapter One      The Kilda Street Zoo

Chapter Two      The Summer Storm

Chapter Three      Saving Rason

Chapter Four      The Little Heifer

Chapter Five      The Drawing

Chapter Six      Toby’s Illness

Chapter Seven      The Ambulance

Chapter Eight      Deputy Burton and the Spiders

Chapter Nine      Jonathans’ Market

Chapter Ten      Emergency Room

Chapter Eleven      Sharonda

Chapter Twelve      Micah

Chapter Thirteen      Mr. Coleman

Chapter Fourteen      Deputy Burton

Chapter Fifteen      Zealda

Chapter Sixteen      Vagas

Chapter Seventeen      The Climbing Wall

Chapter Eighteen      Zealda’s Place

Chapter Nineteen      Important Choices

Chapter Twenty      Deputy Burton Busts Germaine

Chapter Twenty-One      Beyond Burgers and Tacos

Chapter Twenty-Two      Goodbye Pondera

About the author:

By

Michael W. Neely

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Written with the assistance of:

Veronica, Frankie, Michelle, Shamir, Jesse, Brenda, Maria, Jonathan, Infiniti, Marcus F., Jessica, Vernesia, Jazmin, Luis, Marcus K., Mark, Anthony, Tyree, Timothy, Denise, Minerva, Cristal, Erica, Brandon, Peter, Tysha, Nohely, Brittney, Kory, Christopher and Tracy.

The students listed here participated in the creation of the story, the characters, and the illustrations on a daily basis during an academic year in Mr. Neely’s 5th Grade classroom at Eldorado Elementary School in Lancaster, California.

Analysis—Reading Level 5.4

Readability—Optimal

Readability: 5.4

Readability beta (alternative): 67.7

(100 = easy, 20 = hard, 60-70 = optimal)

Word count: 17,602

Number of different words: 3958

Average syllables per word: 1.51

Sentence count:2800

Average sentence length: 11.37

http://textalyser.net

This tool made by Bernhard Huber Internet Engineering Company

all rights reserved 2004 © textalyser.net text analysis V 1.05

NOTE:

The illustrations in this book were created by the students, the author, or were taken from open sources. Some of the names and locations in this book are those of real people and places. They were chosen out of respect by the students because those individuals and locations were relevant and meaningful to them. They do not represent characterizations or representations of those individuals in any way. The characters were deliberately developed to have vague ethnicity.

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The streets and physical features of this imaginary community were named after students, teachers, and other school staff members. Pondera was the street where the school was located.

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El Dorado Elementary School

The imaginary town of Pondera

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Dedications

This book is dedicated to Mr. John Keily.

More than just a Teacher of the Year—a scientist—educator for life and an example for all, he was a great volunteer and a wonderful addition to my classroom.

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One of Mr. Keily’s creations

I would also like to thank the teachers and administrators I worked with over thirty-six years who believed in freedom and creativity—for teachers, students, and even administrators. There are so many wonderful people out there in classrooms all over our country doing a tough job day in and day out. God bless them all!

But there was one who towered above the others and that individual educator and administrator was Mr. Howard H. Horn. I will never be able to repay him for his trust and support over many years.

Howard Horn was my teacher, mentor, and sometimes, protector. I tried to always be there for him as he always was for me. Every teacher deserves a leader like that.

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Mr. Howard H. Horn—at bat

Introduction

In days gone by when teachers had the freedom to be creative—I developed this project.

It was intended as an on-line book for the students in one of my 5th grade classes at El Dorado Elementary School in Lancaster, California.

We designed the entire story in class. Each day the students would suggest new material and I would write it into the story for them.

All of the events were somehow relevant to them and their lives. I didn’t always think the suggestions were the best thing for the story, but I respected their desire to include the material.

In at least one case, a parent asked me to help her prepare her son for his father’s cancer treatment. We built a chapter around this idea. It provided an opportunity for us to discuss the material—as a class. I believe it was very helpful to that particular parent’s child.

This is an example of the way classroom creative writing activities can help engage students in the creative processes of writing, illustrating, planning a book and then reading it. They are eager and want to read the new material each day. It helps them feel connected to what is going on in the classroom. It provides them with a sense of accomplishment

In addition, I would create a daily vocabulary list based on words I used in each day’s production. They would use these words in sentences, word puzzles, and word searches.

No, their vocabulary words were not taken from an approved list. But they were words of high value and relevance to those students at that time. They were words the students were far more likely to remember and use in the future rather than words that frequently appear on standardized tests.

I tried never to give my students tests. My goal was to get them to produce work all day, every day. I had them bring their completed work to me after each assignment and I corrected it on the spot and asked them to take it back to their seats and make any necessary corrections. I corrected EVERY paper and I knew exactly where they stood academically.

A test is given to help a teacher, or someone else, determine what a student knows—when the ability of that student is unknown. In a sense, a test is an admission by the teacher that the student’s abilities are unknown. It also implies that the system does not trust the teacher to know.

When I taught 7th and 8th grade middle school students, an experienced teacher advised me to only look at every third or fourth paper turned in by students. The volume of work students at that level can generate is formidable. I still tried to look at and grade every paper as it was turned in. Since I created most of their work, I could very quickly assess its completeness and correctness. I assigned a grade to the paper in front of the student and gave it a number in order to have an idea of how quickly it had been completed.

I just couldn’t let myself lose that connection between the student’s effort and the evaluation process.

It also occurred to me early in my teaching career that tests are an excellent way of teaching children the value of cheating. Cheating was something I decided I did not want to teach. I always had my students work as partners or in groups. My classrooms were noisy, but very busy places. Cheating was an impossibility.

I remember remarking to a colleague when the Bush era of No Child Left Behind began, that the entire concept was brainless and would take much of the creativity out of teaching. We see the results today with the United States ranked number seventy-five in the world. It is impossible to calculate how much time, money, and talent was wasted on the government’s bogus concepts.

As with the New Math ideas of the sixties and seventies, tremendous damage was done to our educational system in attempts to fix what was actually not broken. Teachers were never the problem. But when families, society, and our institutions fall apart, it has always been the teachers who were asked to make improvements and keep up scores.

Amazingly, teachers have actually been fairly successful at doing so through unrewarded extra effort. This encouraged government to think