Sunday, March 10, 2013

Question Boy Meets Miss Know-It-All


This is one my favorite newly published books!  The superheroes in the book steer away from Question Boy and his incessant questioning.  Things change when he meets Miss-Know-It-All.  She knows the answers to all of his questions and continues with information that he doesn't even want.  When they face off cape to tiara, there's no telling who will outsmart the other.

A nice touch that author Peter Catalanotta adds is that one of the facts that Miss-Know-It-All blurts on each page is inaccurate.  The wrong facts are posted on the back of the book (don't tell your kids).

This book offers a few fun collaborations for the classroom teacher and the librarian.
First, you could invite a classroom teacher to join you for a lesson in the library using reference books to find information.  Read the book to the kids and have the facts in the book listed for teams of four students.  Have the teams use the reference books you have in the library:  encyclopedia, dictionary, almanac, thesaurus, atlas, and any nonfiction books the students want to use.  Each team has to decipher which of Miss-Know-It-All's facts from the story are accurate and which are incorrect.  You could have teams mark out the wrong answers as teams find them.  This would probably work best with students working in teams, but all students working together as a group because there are several facts to find in the book.  You could also assign teams a specific set of facts from the book.

An extension on this lesson would be to have students use the idea of a certain number of truths and one lie for a subject they are learning in class.  This would be a great content-area review when a teacher has already covered a topic in social studies and science and wants a fun review for her students.  I am looking forward to collaborating with my daughter's fourth grade teacher to try this out in the next few weeks!  I have to thank my assistant principal for this great idea.

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