Her name was Wanda Petronski, she was poor and didn’t have many friends.ī: Well, other girls were talking about their dresses and Wanda said that she had one hundred of them, but no one believed her, so they made fun of her whenever they saw her. So, can you remember what you wrote? Let’s start with the girl who gets bullied, shall we?ī: Yes ma’am. And while we were reading it, she gave us each a sheet and then we had to list the character traits and personality of each of the main characters in the story. She didn’t always succeed, but then again, neither did I when I was her age, nor did Maddie and Peggy, the two main characters in Eleanor Estes’ classic story about a little girl who is ostracised and bullied by her unkind classmates.ī: A teacher. “Little girls can be so mean,” was a common refrain from other parents, and I urged Anna to try as best she could but in every circumstance to be kind, regardless of how others were treating her.

I listened to her woes, soothed and counselled but decided ultimately, to allow her to find her own solutions and to make her own way. Back then, she was grappling with playground politics for the first time – best friends who made unreasonable requests and cliques that excluded her because she didn’t have the latest trendy toy – and fumbling miserably. I read The Hundred Dresses some years ago, when Anna was still in lower school. Wanda lived way up on Boggins Heights, and Boggins Heights was no place to live.

The hundred dresses by eleanor estes