In school, Ferruolo’s children would write “small-moment stories,” which turned out to be the perfect inspiration for her writing, she said, showing the children a picture of a chickadee feeding from her father’s palm years ago. They have a conversation, get in a group, and it’s more student-led than adult,” Skelly said. We started it in the first, second grades, so they build upon it. “We had sentence starters for them in the beginning. We keep going and going …” Makenzi Greenberg, 9, piped up, explaining her classroom experience.įourth grade teacher Martin Skelly said the students learned about the author’s craft and purpose, and using “accountable talk” as a way to support rigorous thinking in class. “Once we see the paper, we start writing and we can’t stop. In morning meeting, this person never listens, and I get stressed and I don’t want to do it,” Charlize said. “I don’t like it, because I feel like they’re going to mess it up somehow. “Most people will say writing is revision,” she said.Ĭharlize Stevens Mayfield, 9, raised her hand, asking if it’s “normal” for an author to want someone else to write along with them. “Nobody sits down and writes a book and that’s it,” Ferruolo said, then flashed a picture of her daughter standing next to a giant pile of papers: all the various drafts of her book collected over two years of writing. “I thought that was a yucky name for something so beautiful,” and so Ferruolo arrived at Ruby’s name.įerruolo told the kids there are many steps in the writing process, but the most important one is revision. The book also involves a total lunar eclipse, often called a blood moon. “On that first Saturday after we moved to Fortin, Vermont, when I watched my mom get handcuffed and placed in the back of a police cruiser, that’s what I thought about. One minute they’re there, then poof, like a magic trick, they’re gone,” the book says. The 295-page work of fiction begins engagingly. “That’s what I want you to find in your characters … what’s deep inside,” said Ferruolo, a former Windham County defense attorney and Hartford criminal defender. The teacher in the book urges the student to keep going and he finds a “red pill” - the cork ball center.
Then there’s this white string layer,” Ferruolo told the students, holding up a ball her husband had taken apart so she could describe the process in her novel. In one scene in the book, Ruby Moon Hayes’ teacher holds up a baseball in class, and asks a student to cut it open to demonstrate the layers of people’s personalities.
Her award-winning book, “Ruby in the Sky,” aimed at middle schoolers and published in February by Farrar Straus Giroux, tells the tale of a 12-year-old girl who is embarrassed to tell her classmates about her mother’s arrest after helping a homeless woman.
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