I finally showed this 3 minute video to all my 3rd graders this week. Adam filmed this video of me while we were wandering around Montparnasse on New Year’s Eve, and I meant to show it to the kids at the beginning of January. I’ve been reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret with them since Thanksgiving. But then I got sick, then I had to catch up, then we had snow days. So this week I showed it to all of my 3rd grade classes, and it was a big hit. It took 15 minutes to watch the video because we paused it a lot so they could ask questions.

They had so many questions! They wanted to know about Paris, about the neighborhood where this was filmed, how much of our story is real, if I went into the cemetery, what else I saw in Paris. It was so cool, and I’m really glad I filmed this for them. I’ll have to keep my eyes open now for places I go in the future that I can tie into books I read at school. Because they really, really loved it. It’s changed the way they think about the book now that they’ve seen the city come alive a little bit more. This week with the 3rd graders is one of the best experiences I’ve had as a teacher so far.