Don't be my Valentine

The chapter book Don't be my Valentine by Joan M. Lexau is a great holiday book for Valentine's Day but is also a story with good meaning behind it. The book is about two different students who do not get along. A girl named Amy Lou is always bugging a student named Sam about things he does not do right. Sam gets annoyed with Amy Lou and is mean to her because he does not like Amy thinking she always has the correct answer for him. A good lesson that I can relate to from this book is that sometimes adult authority needs to get involved when children are arguing. The two students try to solve their problem regarding a mysterious valentine card, but end up getting in another fight just when the book is ending. This reminds me of when my sister and I would get in arguments when we were younger, my mom would always tell us you guys cannot come out of your room until you have solved your problem. We would pretend we would solve our problem just so we could go out and play. One time when we came out of our rooms with a "solution", we both started to play with dolls again, and my sister started to hit me because she was still bitter about our argument earlier. My mom finally realized that for my sister and I to get along she would have to talk out what went wrong, and ways we could fix our problem. She also realized sometimes it meant just giving us time to be apart for a little bit so we could cool down. I think the teacher in the book realized that she probably needed to help the students figure out a plan to get along, and not just let them solve it themselves.