Mrs. McBloom, Clean Up Your Classroom! - Hardcover

DiPucchio, Kelly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786809329 ISBN 13: 9780786809325

Publisher: Disney-Hyperion, 2005

Synopsis

There is a mysterious new student at Fitzgerald High, Jake Garret. He seems to have it all figured out. He looks like he just stepped off the cover of the J. Crew catalog, he is the best kicker the football team has ever had, and best of all, he hosts the party to go to every Friday night. All the guys want to be like him and all the girls want to date him, but Jake only has eyes for Didi, the girlfriend of alpha male and quarterback, Todd Buckley . As Jake's friend Rick gets to know him, he at first admires him, then starts to like him, but soon grows to fear for him as he learns Jake's dangerous secret. From beloved young adult author Gordon Korman, comes a new look at age-old themes about popularity, acceptance, and human nature.

About this title

From School Library Journal

Kindergarten-Grade 2–Mrs. McBloom is retiring after 50 years of teaching, and it's time to clean up Room Five for her successor. But that's easier said than done. The classroom has become an ecosystem with trees and animals coexisting peacefully with odd mittens, sneakers, and piles of books. It's a magical mess. Eventually, her students arrive at a solution, and the whole town lines up to select one thing each from the clutter. The resulting yard sale makes enough to send the woman away on the fancy-shmancy cruise she had always wanted to take. The artwork's MAD Magazine-style characters are not very appealing, but the wealth of strange objects to be discovered on every page will engage readers' interest. Owls, woodpeckers, chipmunks, and hens that knit are ensconced with art projects, dinosaur fossils, playing cards, and baseballs. The room gradually grows more cluttered from the day Mrs. McBloom starts out in her '50s-style clothes (pictured in black and white), long before that Armstrong fella set his tootsies on the moon. The story is told in a folksy voice with a rollicking rhythm and rich phraseology. DiPucchio's language will stretch readers' understanding of the different ways that people can turn a phrase, with such expressions as eye-poppin', heart-stoppin', higgly-piggly, and smack-dab sprinkled throughout the text. And kids will relish the idea that adults, too, sometimes need to clean their rooms.–Jane Barrer, Washington Square Village Creative Steps, New York City
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

K-Gr. 2. Classroom clutter and chaos are fun in this picture book, and so is the sense of everyone in a small town pulling together. Mrs. McBloom has taught at Knickerbocker Elementary for nearly 50 years, and she has never once cleaned her classroom. Now she is due to retire, and everyone wonders how she will ready the room for the new, young teacher. One small pupil comes up with the solution, and every former student in town comes to take something away. The comic pictures are packed with all kinds of objects, and the cleaners uncover more things when they begin work, including a library book 35 years overdue and three buffalo nickels. The beloved, eccentric teacher gets a fond send-off. The nostalgic images (a picture of Elvis on an old lunch box) will mean more to adults than kids, but children will still enjoy the messy farce. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786809329
• ISBN 13: 9780786809325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Francis Guy