Patricia Polacco is my new favorite author. In The Junkyard Wonders she celebrates the children in Room 206, the children in Mrs. Peterson's class. They are excluded from the mainstream classrooms for a variety of reasons. The rest of the school laughs at these children. But Mrs. Peterson encourages them to work together, pooling their talents to accomplish goals. "Gibbie had tics and shouted for no reason sometimes, but his father was a professor of engineering and Gibbie loved to build things--boy, was he smart." This class is nicknamed the junkyard. Ironically, this class takes a field trip to a junkyard to scavenge for odds and ends that could be used to build things. (Two children in The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages does the same and are similarly ridiculed.) Polacco ends with an author's note describing the career successes of several students in this story. Her postscript adds punch to an already powerful story.
