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Read Aloud - My Teacher is an Alien

© Irene Taylor

Halloween is a great time to start reading a scary story to your kids. One of my favorite "early-in-the-school-year" read aloud books is My Teacher is an Alien, by Bruce Coville. We all know that little folks enjoy hearing a story, but I often read aloud, even to my fourth and fifth graders, and they love it! This book is great to use early in the year with older students for several reasons. First, it is a good scary story. "Staged" properly, with the correct scary inflections, and strategically placed pauses, this story has been a favorite of my classes for many years. Reading it aloud at this time of year is also fun, as Halloween is just around the corner. Too old for the cute little Halloween stories we often think of, the Bruce Coville books provided a fun, yet somewhat scary story for October. And... students are often amazed that a teacher would actually read such a story to them! My students often thought of me as just a bit more "cool" once I began reading this story to them!

My Teacher is an Alien, also available to download from Barnes and Noble, is appropriate for ages 9 through 12, but I'd be alert while reading for the occasional part you may want to skip over or reword. The story is a "student's eye" take on the classic "aliens plot to take over the world" genre. It falls to the two heroes of the story, sixth graders Susan Simmons and Peter Thompson, to expose their teacher, Mr. Smith, as the alien and to save their school (and the world) from an alien takeover. There are some fun descriptions of the aliens and a neat alien language you'll want to try out ahead of time, or have fun "winging it" as you read aloud to the class!

Is Your Teacher an Alien? is a good follow-up book. In this 1997 sequel, Susan and Peter "conduct their alien investigations through Mad Lib-style activities, including crosswords, secret messages, translations and secret languages, word search games, alien trivia, fill-in quizzes, alien jokes, top 10 lists, riddles, anagrams, plus a secret code that lets kids access a free demo of the Bruce Coville's My Teacher Is an Alien CD-ROM game."

Once your class is hooked on Bruce Coville, they may want to explore other books that he has written. The Alien Teacher series includes titles such as My Teacher Glows in the Dark,

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