Losing a tooth is a significant moment for kids. In fact, it’s so significant that many kids can tell you exactly where they were when they lost each one of their teeth.
One 8-year-old Vancouver girl who is definitely going to remember her experience losing her tooth is Avery Patchett because it’s a story that involves a time of panic, a heroic school principal, and a rather large dollar bill in the end.
Global News Canada reported that Patchett was in her classroom at James Hill Elementary School when the big moment happened and her third tooth came out. In order to keep track of the tooth, her teacher gave her a special plastic tooth necklace to keep her tooth in until she went home at the end of the day.
The tooth, however, didn’t spend very much time inside the tooth necklace, as the third-grader told reporters that once she went outside for recess, she tripped on the stairs and her tooth went flying out of the necklace.
“When I tripped and lost it, I lost it forever,” she said. “I looked a couple of times and I still haven’t found it because the tooth looks like rocks.”
After looking and looking for the tooth in the dirt with her friends to no avail, Patchett became distressed and turned to the school’s principal, Chris Wejr, for help.
“She was upset because she had lost her lost tooth and she was worried the Tooth Fairy wasn’t going to come,” Wejr said, according to Global News Canada.
“I said ‘well, I’ve sent a letter to the Tooth Fairy before and it worked’ and I [asked] ‘what do you think about us sitting down and writing up a formal letter with our logo on it and everything and giving that to the tooth fairy?’”
And that’s just what the two of them did. Together, they constructed a letter to the tooth fairy explaining what happened to her tooth so she could place that under her pillow that night.
Patchett shared that the letter worked and the next morning she woke to a five dollar bill under her pillow.
The letter, pictured below, has since been shared on Facebook and has received lots of positive feedback.
“What is small to us may be huge to a child so it is important to stay in the moment and give children the care they need […] We need to model kindness and show them they matter,” Principal Wejr said.
Avery’s mother, Debbie Patchett, was taken aback and speechless with what the principal did for her little girl; she told HuffPost B.C. that she was incredibly touched by the “kind and compassionate gesture” he took to make “what could have been a sad memory into such a wonderful memory for our little girl.”
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