In this mysterious book by one of my favorite authors, Kate Dicamillo, an eleven year old boy named Peter Augustus Duchene learns from a fortune teller that he must follow “the elephant” to find his long lost sister. He is confused; there are no elephants in his town and there haven’t been for years, until a magician conjures up an elephant. Little does he know, but him and his friends Leo Matienne, Madam LaVaughn, Bartok Whynn, Sister Marie, Hans Ickman, Tomas, and Iddo are about to go on a long journey to save his sister and the elephant.
I’m not sure, but I believe that this book would fall under the category of fiction (or if there is such a thing, mysterious fiction) and that it is set in a old fashioned city called Baltese. It is an interesting book; I like how the author changes perspective in each chapter and how you can even go inside the elephants head and look at the story from her point of view, and I also really like how the author describes Peter’s meals: exceptionally small fish and three day old bread. Something I dislike, though, is that the story gets a little dry at points. The age range, I think, would be from about 8 to 13. No lower than eight because younger children might understand it, but no higher than 13 because older children might not be into books like this. I also think the age range should start at 8 instead of 9 because of the length of the book; it isn’t very long.
I thought this was a very haunting but amusing read, and I would recommend it to anyone who is a big fan of Kate’s other books
I recently went to the movie theater and saw the movie “Where the Wild Things Are”. I thought it was really good! It was really beautifully made and the Wild Things looked just like the ones in the book. I liked some parts better than others, though; I really liked the part when Max said “Let the wild rumpus start!”, but I thought the part when they were having a mud-ball fight was kind of weird. Although it was based on a children’s book, I wouldn’t recommend it for smaller children; I think the director tried to aim it at older kids and adults. But all in all, I thought it was a really good adaptation of the book, and it’s definitely worth while.
Hey everyone!
I’m back and guess what? Now I’m a book blogger! That means I’ll be reading books and writing posts on what I think of them. So stay tuned!
After a lot of hard work, ( to hear about it in more detail, click here, here, here, and here). C16mm and I have finished our comic and it is really great! It is called The Mock Turtle’s Story and the Lobster Quadrille. If you want to see it, click here. All of our class’s comics were so great, that we had a party to celebrate it! A tea-party, that is. It was an Alice in Wonderland tea-party, and it was really fun! We even got to play Pin the Smile on the Cheshire Cat! To see the post on that, click here!
If you didn’t know, the wizard of Oz is a very popular book written by L. Frank Baum. When he first tried to publish it, they wouldn’t accept it. But he kept trying to get it published, and one day, his hard work payed off, because someone liked it! After it got published, it became famous. So famous, that MGM decided to turn it into a movie! It was a fairly good adaptation, but remember, this was a long time ago, so most of it was black and white, but it was very surprising when Dorothy landed in Munchkin Land and everything became colored. The wicked witches also came up a little to often and Glinda forgot to kiss Dorothy. And there was never any next door neighbor that wanted Toto gone. There were never so many flying monkeys and they forgot the Golden Cap, but all in all, for that time in history, I think MGM did a very good job with their hit movie, The Wizard of Oz. Although The Wizard of Oz is a good book, I think Alice in Wonderland is a better book because it uses better words for describing stuff, it is funnier, and, (in my opinion) is more exciting. I think they are both great, and well done books.
I had lots of fun blogging this year. We got to make our own banners, write posts and even do podcasts! My personal favorite was doing the banners because we got to draw them. I didn’t really like doing podcasts as much, though, because they were so complicated. I learned that you can write posts and then add pictures. You can even add movies! If I get a post next year I would want to write longer, and more exciting posts. I really enjoyed writing on this blog, and I hope to continue blogging next year.
Our buddies from Little Dalton, are going to interview us on how we got from Little Dalton to Big Dalton. They are going to use the questions we used for interviewing our older friends. They might want to change some questions, though, like “Do you have a Visa?”. I will explain some of the differences between Big D. and Little D. :
1.Big Dalton has a lot more floors
2. Big Dalton has more food to choose from for lunch.
3. Little Dalton has those tiles that we made on the walls.
…and much more!
C16mm and I have been working really hard on our comic and, if you want to see it, I might be able to include it in this blog post but, I’m not sure if I can do that. We have started on comic life and it’s really fun! You can put in your own pictures, use cool speech bubbles, and make fun looking boxes to put all your picture’s in! You can also stretch out stuff so it looks really weird and you can color in speech bubbles! We are almost done, and I bet we’ll be finished really soon!
This is a letter, that if my pilgrim character that I designed was real, might have wrote. Her cousin, Elizabeth, from London, did not come on the Mayflower, and Alice might have written a letter to her.
Dear Cousin Elizabeth, I hope thou are doing well in London. Do not worry about me, the new land has many natural resources that we can use to pay our debt.
We have made new friends with the Indians. They are very clever. One of the ways they grow food is by putting fish in the soil and the food grows really well. There is not a very large selection of foods, but we thank god that we have any at all.
All of the men have signed a compact that says that we will stay together, for if we leave each other alone, we might get killed by the Indians. They are not too trustworthy.
We have built a town, graveyard, and fort to defend ourselves and, although people are dying, it is a free land, and I hope thou will decide to come to America.
Your cousin, Alice
We (me and c16mm) have cut out certain parts of our dialogue in our Alice in Wonderland chapter because we had a LOT of text and we just took out parts that we thought were not as important as the others. Most of our classmates are making a theme for their chapter, but we think that ours should look like the original. (Such as Alice, but with brown hair.) We are almost ready to use Comic Life!
