I bought this book more as a teaching tool than a read aloud. Last year the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance partnered with the Library of Congress for Read.gov to play a round of the Exquisite Corpse game with top children's authors and illustrators. You could follow each installment online last year. They have now compiled the whole story and published it as a book.
The purpose of the game is to start telling a story and end on a cliffhanger while passing it on to a new person to tell the next part. For this reason, its a quick read and while it can get confusing or even frustrating at parts, you continue to read because the cliffhangers are so good. That is why I bought this book as a teaching tool. I thought it would be fun to not only introduce the game of the Exquisite Corpse but to show such a well-done novel length version of it. You could take a section and see what the kids would write for the next installment and then compare that to what the authors wrote. Or use it in art and give each student a different chapter and have them illustrate it without knowing what came before or after as the illustrators did for this book.
The story basically follows twins, Joe and Nancy, who are trying to piece together a time traveling robot to save their parents, whom they have never met because they were living with a traveling circus to save them from aliens, from their time traveling other dimension. If you think that's confusing thats just the nutshell version.
Interest level: Grades 3-6 Intended reading level: Grade 5
Genre: all-over the place but I would say Adventure/Sci-fi
Comparable titles: Series of Unfortunate Events
Book Connections: robots, clowns, eggs, elephants, circus-themed events
No comments:
Post a Comment