Fourth Grade
Worksheets
Barbara Park
Barbara Park loved to laugh. She once said that as a child, she always found herself to be incredibly amusing. If she thought of something funny, she would say it. This got her in trouble at school. She would often think of - and say - funny things while the teacher was talking. Like many kids, young Barbara didn't like to write. To her, a writing assignment at school was one of the worst things in the world. She didn't have much of an interest in reading, either. She did like comic books, though!
As Barbara got older, her interests began to change. During high school, she started to like reading more and more. In college, she studied history and education. She wanted to be a high school history teacher, or so she thought. She hoped that she could make history more fun by making her students laugh. Her plans changed during her senior year of college. That is when she did her student teaching. Because of a scheduling problem, she ended up working in a seventh grade classroom. Barbara said it was worse than a disaster! She knew then that she would never be a teacher.
After college, Barbara and her husband decided to start a family. They had two sons. Barbara stayed home to take care of her young sons. As they got older, though, Barbara knew that it was time for her to start working. She was only qualified be a teacher. Her love of reading and her desire to avoid teaching inspired her to try to writing. She tried writing a lot of different things. She wrote articles for the newspaper. She even tried writing greeting cards. One day, one of her sons brought home a book from school. It was Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. After reading it, Barbara thought that she might be good at writing books for kids.
