Here's a brief history of how this activity came about. In December 1997, students from five schools in Texas and New York read The Watsons Go to Birmingham and participated in an online discussion of the book at this web site. Several months later, Mr. Curtis came across the archived discussion and read all the comments that students had written. He was so impressed with the quality of the conversation that he wrote to Small Planet and asked if there were any way he could respond to some of the comments. That's when we decided to set up this special online discussion.