Ms. Coco Is Loco! (My Weird School Series #16)

by Dan Gutman, Jim Paillot (Illustrator)

Overview

Something weird is going on!

It's Poetry Month! And Ms. Coco, who runs the gifted and talented program, is poetry crazy! She cries when she sees a sunset! She thinks boys should have feelings! She talks in rhyme! All the time! Will A.J.'s life ever be normal again?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061141539
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/27/2007
Series:	My Weird School Series , #16
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	15,624
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.62(h) x 0.22(d)
Lexile:	620L (what's this?)
Age Range:	6 - 10 Years

About the Author

Dan Gutman has always been a baseball fanatic. He played in Little League as a kid, and one of the first magazine articles he ever sold explained the science behind the spitball, the scuffball, and corked bats. When he thought about the T206 Honus Wagner—the most valuable baseball card in the world—he began to write honus & me, his first Baseball Card Adventure.

Dan is also the author of the New York Times bestselling Genius Files series, as well as the internationally bestselling My Weird School series.

Jim Paillot lives in Arizona (another weird place) with his weird wife and two weird children. Isn’t that weird?

Read an Excerpt

My Weird School #16: Ms. Coco Is Loco!

---

By Dan Gutman

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 Dan Gutman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061141546

---

Chapter One

Chillin' at the School Store

My name is A.J. and I hate school.

The only cool part of Ella Mentry School is the school store. It's a little room near the office where they sell stuff. Mostly they have pencils and pens and junk like that. They never have anything useful, like skateboards or video games. Still, it's cool to buy stuff when you're at school.

The school store is open in the morning before the bell rings. The only problem is, I spent all my allowance over the weekend on a new football because some kid stole mine. So I didn't even have a dime to buy anything at the school store. Bummer in the summer!

"Guess what I bought with my own money?" this girl with curly brown hair named Andrea Young whispered to her crybaby friend Emily. Knowing Andrea, it was probably an encyclopedia.

"What did you buy?" asked Emily.

"An encyclopedia!" Andrea said, all excited. "It's an encyclopedia for kids!"

Ugh. Andrea loves reading and books and school and anything else that's boring. She keeps a dictionary on her desk so she can look up words and show everybody how much she knows. Andrea is like a human filing cabinet.

"You know what I'm going to do with my encyclopedia?" Andrea asked Emily. Knowing Andrea,she would probably read the whole thing in ABC order so she would know everything in the world.

"I'm going to read it in ABC order," Andrea bragged. "If I finish one letter every day, by the end of the month I'll know everything! Won't that be cool?"

Yeah, cool like an oven. I wish a set of encyclopedias would fall on Andrea's head.

The bell rang and we all rushed to class. Our teacher, Miss Daisy, told us to put away our stuff and get ready for circle time. That's when we sit around in a circle, so it has the perfect name.

Suddenly the voice of the school secretary, Mrs. Patty, came over the loudspeaker.

"Miss Daisy, please send Andrea and A.J. to Ms. Coco's room."

"Oooooh!" my friend Ryan said. "A.J. and Andrea are going to Ms. Coco's room again. They must be in love!"

"When are you gonna get married?" asked my other friend Michael.

If those guys weren't my best friends, I would hate them.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from My Weird School #16: Ms. Coco Is Loco! by Dan Gutman Copyright © 2007 by Dan Gutman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Editorial Reviews

In more adventures of the "My Weird School" series, the kids at Ella Mentry School are faced with something truly terrible—National Poetry Month. At least A.J. and his friends think it is terrible. A whole month devoted to poetry? Even worse, the school has set a goal of writing 1,000 poems during April. As a "reward," if the school reaches its goal, Mr. Klutz will invite a real poet to visit the school. The text follows the exploits of A.J. and his friends who attempt to derail the poetry contest. Opposing A.J. is super-student Andrea, who seems to consider herself a real poet—and to like poetry! The text is full of humorous word play and funny rhymes, as the kids discover there just might be more to poetry than they had thought. Paillot's illustrations capture the humor of the text, with a particularly hilarious depiction of the girls all listening to Andrea perform while the boys stuff napkins in their ears to block the sound, but when A.J. performs his special bunny poem for the Kindergarteners, has he gone too far? This book is a great choice for young readers. Reviewer: Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger

Children's Literature - Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger