The Grade 4 Author’s Chair presentation took place on the evening of October 17th, and if you were in the Clarebourne library that night, you already know it was a good one.
For those unfamiliar: Author’s Chair is a tradition Ms. Yolanda Ferreira started in 2015 in which every Grade 4 student completes a semester-long original writing project — fiction, memoir, or narrative nonfiction — and presents it publicly to an audience of classmates, faculty, and families. The pieces are revised multiple times. The presentations are rehearsed. The students introduce their own work, read a passage aloud, and take questions from the audience.
This year’s cohort of twenty-two students presented work ranging from a fictional account of a grandmother’s immigration from Senegal to a memoir about learning to swim to what one parent described afterward as “the funniest piece of short fiction I have read all year, and I include adult novels in that comparison.”
The evening runs about ninety minutes. It consistently produces the highest parent attendance of any Lower School event on the calendar — and, without fail, at least one moment that reminds everyone in the room why this kind of education matters.
If you missed it, mark your calendar now. Author’s Chair takes place every October. It is open to the whole Clarebourne community.