8 Class Pets + 1 Squirrel ÷ 1 Dog = Chaos Read Free Page A

exercise ball and one of the boys kicked it across the reading area. Except nobody was calling for a time-out for this dog.
    The cage had landed on its side, and I could see that the door had not only popped open, it was bent back. It would not close. The cage was no longer someplace to be safe from the dog.
    The dog was looking a bit confused to find the cage wasn’t on the table anymore, but then he spotted us on the floor, and he jumped down.
    â€œRun!” I yelled to Twitch.

A SCHOOL OF NEON TETRAS
(third-grade fish)

    We are in a school.
    We are in a school in a school.
    We are tickled by that idea.
    The people who come to look at us call us neon tetras. We don’t know about that—we just know that we are.
    Each of us has bright blue stripes and bright red stripes. We shine in the dark. We are very beautiful. Even one of us would be very beautiful. But we aren’t one. We are a school.
    We live in the water. Of course. We don’t understand how other creatures live out of the water and breathe the air. But some of them do.

    Our water is surrounded by glass that gives it a square shape. Living in the water with us are some plants and a catfish who eats the slime off the sides of the glass. She does not have blue stripes, she does not have red stripes, she is not beautiful, and she doesn’t have much to say. But she keeps our water clean.
    Sharing the water with us, but not living, is a shipwreck and a miniature man with a treasure chest that opens and closes. In the treasure chest are sparkly gems. On the floor of our square pond are sparkly stones. Neither the gems nor the stones are as sparkly as we are.
    We dart back and forth in our glass-enclosed pond and around the shipwreck.
    We are a school.
    Outside of the glass that forms the boundary ofour pond is a man who feeds us fish flakes and frozen brine shrimp. (Yum! Frozen brine shrimp!)
    There are also little men out there who press their faces against our glass. Our man who feeds us calls these little men “boys and girls.” He says to them, “Boys and girls, do not tap on the glass. Do not lean on the cart and make it move.” Sometimes they do anyway, when he’s not looking.
    When they do, we dart back and forth.
    Our favorite part of the day is global studies. The globe the little men study is a big round thing that shows the world. Most of the world is water.
    That idea tickles us.
    So, beyond our pond there is the room with the man and the little men and the globe; beyond that, there is more glass, which is called “windows.” Beyond that glass is the world, and now we have seen on the globe that most of this is water.
    One of the air-breathers who sometimes looks in through the windows is a creature that calls himself squirrel.
    One day the squirrel came swimming through the air into our room. He came with another creature, a small white creature with a long pink tail. But they were not in a school, because they were not the same.They did not look the same, and they did not move the same.
    The squirrel said, “Help! The dog is going to eat us.”
    We said, “There is protection in a school.”
    The second creature, the one who was not a squirrel, put his ear up to the glass that protects us from the air. We said again, so that he could hear, “There is protection in a school.”
    The nonsquirrel repeated this for the squirrel.
    The squirrel said, “What?”
    We said, “When you swim in a school, only some get eaten, while the rest stay safe. You need to find a school.”
    When his friend told him this, the squirrel said, “Neither one of us wants to get eaten.”
    A creature bigger than either of them entered the room.
    Bigger often eat smaller.
    This big creature said, “Stop running, you sorry waste of fur!”
    The squirrel darted in one direction, and the squirrel’s friend darted in another.
    â€œIn a school!” we told them.
    The big noisy