Genre: Fanciful Fiction, Picture BookThemes: Space, school, excuses, languages
Grade Level: 3-5
Curricular Connections: Science (rockets, space travel) English (vocabulary, context clues)
Henry P. Baloney showed up late for class last Tuesday. It was once too often. He's up for "Permanent Lifelong Detention" unless he can come up with "one very good and very believable excuse." So he begins:
"I misplaced my zimulis. Then I...um...found it on my deski. But...someone had put my deski in a torakku. The torakku drove me right here to szkola. But..."
His story includes many narrow escapes from perilous situations, but each escape leads to another more challenging adventure. Along the way he encounters a razzo, pordo, buttuna, and astrosus. There are piksas and giadrams and cucalations. He even becomes kuningas of an entire planet!
Each nonsense word isn't really nonsense. They are from other languages (including Finnish, Latin, Maltese, and Inuktitut), transpositions (like giadrams), and for good measure, one Spoonerism (a sighing flosser.) A glossary is included.
Classroom Suggestions:
1. Baloney (Henry P) is a great practice lesson in using context clues. All of the unfamiliar words are decipherable in the context of the story. Teachers could read the story without showing the pictures, and students would need to use only the clues from context.
2. Students can learn that pictures in picture books (and textbooks and newspapers and all other printed text) are used for a reason and add to the text's information and reader's understanding. (Students will not know what "to fracasse our szkola" means simply from context, but seeing the school in a ray gun's cross hairs, students can see that "to destroy our school" seems to make sense.)
3. Visit www.baloneyhenryp.com/ for authors' information and book lists (and general silliness as only Lane Smith and Jon Scieszka can deliver.)
4. Although I haven't read it, the Spanish version would offer more opportunities for context clues and comparing text.
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