Home » Writing & Publishing » Word Play » Miss Alaineus - book review and author interview - Page 2

Miss Alaineus - book review and author interview - Page 2

© Sandra Linville

Throughout the book are sentences from Sage’s Extra Credit assignment from her teacher, charting Sage’s feelings, from A to Z, such as: “I have a feeling this awesome ailment will cause me great agony soon” to “I’ll zip my backpack and zoom with zest right out of here.” The students were to choose three words from each letter’s section of the dictionary and write a sentence. In addition, the sentence should include something about the student’s daily activities. Sage’s teacher wrote the comment, “Very creative complaining! Keep up the good work.” and gave her an “A.”

“I almost gave up the idea of the ‘second story’,” Frasier said. “I recently found evidence of the day I considered quitting because I could not figure out how to work the story into the art…But, now, how happy I am that I persisted because I just came from a school that worked miracles with the idea of this assignment. The 6th grade students did much better than I did and I felt buoyed, carried on by the rising tide of their fabulous effort.”

Frasier was inspired to include the book’s grand finale, the Vocabulary Parade, by two experiences: her five-year span of building large costume puppets and her role as substitute coach of an Odyssey of the Mind team in Minneapolis. She also drew on her two decades of experience of designing special projects for schools, combining art and academics.

“I have just seen my first vocabulary parade and my favorite words were rockslide, web (and all the permutations) and gumshoe,” she said. “Also, I saw a hat parade which was astonishing – these from Paterson and Ocean Palms Elementary in the Jacksonville, Florida area.”

Frasier relates that the responses from teachers to this book have been “astonishing.” “Teachers are my great heroes of the world. I know what their days are like and I also know that I cannot do it myself,” she said. “Teachers have changed my life (made me a reader and a lover of words) and my daughter’s life and a zillion other children that I have worked with. I admire the steadfastness they exhibit every single day. I see my job as a service job to them…A fourth grade teacher changed my life by reading The Yearling out loud. All doors opened after that.”

You can read more about the book, Miss Alaineus, at the publisher, Harcourt's, web site and more about the author, Debra Frasier, as well as discover fantastic wordplay activities at her web site.

The copyright of the article Miss Alaineus - book review and author interview - Page 2 in Word Play is owned by . Permission to republish Miss Alaineus - book review and author interview - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.