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Young readers book reviews for ages 8 to 12 years old




*Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster* by Debra Frasier- young readers book review
Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster
by Debra Frasier
Ages 8-12 40 pages Voyager September 2007 Paperback    

Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster is an absolutely adorable book. It’s about a girl, Sage, who is home sick from school when the week’s vocabulary words are introduced. She doesn’t feel well enough to look up the dictionary definitions of all her words, so she invents her own definitions for the words she already knows. Unfortunately, due to her mother once mentioning needing “miscellaneous items” at the grocery store and coming home with a box of pasta with a beautiful woman on the box, Sage believes that Miss Alaineus is the woman on the box of pasta. Her mistake becomes obvious and hugely embarrassing when she gets the word "miscellaneous" in a vocabulary bee.

It’s a cute story, but even more delightful is the ongoing extra credit work that appears on each page. The directions for the extra credit work are to write a sentence for every letter of the alphabet, with each sentence containing three words starting with that letter. Each page of the story has one of these extra credit sentences running sideways or along the bottom, and they are always relevant to the story.

The illustrations, also done by the author, are charming and child-friendly as well. They’re mostly primary colors and a lot of green, and they appear to have been done on lined notebook paper, with the streaky look of a drawing colored in by a child using markers.

Every character in the book has a name that’s really a common noun, such as Forest or Miss Page or Cliff, and these names, along with other bolded vocabulary words, are defined by Sage as she tells the story.

On top of all this fun, the endpapers are word-search puzzles containing the vocabulary words encountered in the story, and at the end of the book, the reader encounters Sage’s scrapbook, with all the costumes she’s ever worn to her school’s vocabulary parades, as well as her teacher’s comments on her completed extra credit assignment.

Young readers book reviews for ages 8 to 12 years old

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