Miss Small is off the wall!

Gr 2-3-Miss Daisy's athletic second graders are looking forward to their new phys ed class, but it turns out to be radically different from their expectations in Dan Gutman's humorous easy-chapter book (HarperCollins, 2005). Ironically, Miss Small, the gym teacher, is extremely tall, so most of the boys guess they'll be starting with basketball. Or football. Or, that perennial favorite of bullies everywhere, dodge ball, where the express purpose is to hurt someone with the ball. Instead, students must balance a feather on their finger, partner up for square dancing, juggle scarves, and do the chicken dance! Pretty much everything other than sports is declared "dumb" by A. J. and his pals, who enjoy put downs, class clowning, and shooting straw wrappers at girls. Miss Small eventually wins over the naysayers with her games and "Cootie" Philosophy: a jarring acronym of Cooperation, Teamwork, and Sportsmanship. Immaturity with hyperbole reigns throughout the series, and the low standard continues: adults are "boring," and the word "dumb" is used over and over again. Luckily, teen narrator, Jared Goldsmith, gets the voices just right, and the short chapters will be palatable for reluctant readers.-Lonna Pierce, MacArthur Elementary School, Binghamton, NY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

My Weird School #5: Miss Small Is off the Wall! AER Chapter One Fizz Ed is the Coolest My name is A.J. and I hate school. Well, I hate that reading and writing and arithmetic part of school, anyway. That stuff is for the birds! There's only one thing about school that I like. Fizz Ed. Fizz Ed! I love Fizz Ed! Fizz Ed is the coolest! Fizz Ed isn't even like school at all. Fizz Ed is what you would be doing if you didn't have to go to school. If you ask me, school would be cool if we could just have Fizz Ed all day long and forget about all that boring reading and writing and arithmetic stuff. Well, actually, to be honest, I've never had Fizz Ed. At my school, the Ella Mentry School, we didn't have Fizz Ed last year when we were in first grade. But my friend Billy around the corner goes to a different school. Billy's in third grade, and he told me that at his school they play dodgeball and basketball and football in Fizz Ed. They get to do anything they want. Man, I wish I could go to Billy's school instead of boring old Ella Mentry School. I've been waiting forever until I got to second grade, when we would have Fizz Ed. "Okay, everybody, it's time to line up," my teacher, Miss Daisy, announced one morning after we pledged the allegiance. "Line up for what?" we all asked. "Fizz Ed!" Miss Daisy said. "We're going to meet Miss Small in the gym." "Yippee!" My Weird School #5: Miss Small Is off the Wall! AER . Copyright © by Dan Gutman . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from My Weird School #5 by Jim Paillot, Dan Gutman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.