Scholastics author biography page for jon scieszka

A junkyard action-packed world of boy trucks and girl trucks who act just like rambunctious kindergarteners maybe because author Scieszka based them all on real kindergarteners. A series of 4 picture books, 10 early readers, and a construction site full of activity books designed to rev up preschool readers. Lovingly detailed by the amazing illustration garage of Shannon, Long, and Gordon.

Clever science experiments, funny jokes, and robot hijinks await readers in the New York Times bestselling Frank Einstein chapter book series from the mad scientist team of Jon Scieszka and Brian Biggs. The perfect combination to engage and entertain readers, the series features real science facts with adventure and humor, making these books ideal for STEM education.

Kid-genius and inventor Frank Einstein loves figuring out how the world works by creating household contraptions that are part science, part imagination, and definitely unusual. Lane drew a few illustrations for the story and took it to show many publishers. He got rejected by all of them. Jon and Lane liked A. They kept showing it around.

They kept getting rejected. Finally, Regina Hayes, an editor at Viking Books said she thought the story and the illustrations were funny. She said she would publish the book. Including, nicely, Polish. Since , Jon has written too many books for him to count. His books have won a whole mess of awards. Some have been turned into TV shows. Working on a movie.

And they have sold over 11 million copies all around the world. And now he is pretty sure he has diplomatic immunity. Math Curse, another Smith-Scieszka collaboration, "is one of the great books of the decade, if not of the century," commented Dorothy M. Broderick in Voice of Youth Advocates. The narrator, a little girl, is caught up in a remark made by her math teacher, Mrs.

Fibonacci: "You know, you can turn almost anything into a math problem. She finally "breaks out of her prison," Stevenson continued, "by using two halves of chalk to make a w hole.

Scholastics author biography page for jon scieszka

As in Scieszka and Smith's earlier works, Math Curse slyly introduces mature elements of humor. Fibonacci likes to count using the Fibonacci series of numbers. The author and illustrator credits are contained within a Venn diagram, and the price is written in binary rather than Arabic numerals. Like a traditional math textbook, the answers to the questions are printed in the book: in this case, they appear upside-down on the back cover.

The stories are billed as "fables that Aesop might have told if he were alive today and sitting in the back of the class daydreaming," and their morals include "Don't ever listen to a talking bug" and "You should always tell the truth. But if your mom is out having the hair taken off her lip, you might want to forget a few of the details.

Scieszka and Smith teamed up again for Baloney Henry P. This language includes many foreign words and some coined by Scieszka; a guide at the end of the book helps readers translate. He thought "the words used to describe Baloney's odyssey through space and language are rather more interesting and unexpected than anything that actually happens to him," but added that "there is something pleasantly subversive … about this bug-eyed linguistic space creature.

Nearly ten years after the publication of Math Curse, Scieszka and Smith answered reader requests for a science sequel. Scieszka tried ten to twenty different versions of the book before coming up with one he liked; he explained to a Publishers Weekly interviewer: "The name Science Verse came to me with the idea of writing parodies of famous verse and poems … with scientific content.

And then all of the work and struggling was suddenly like flying. Newton, to change the way she thinks. As a result, she begins seeing the world in terms of the "poetry of science"—in this case, literally poetry based on scientific concepts. Food additives are featured in a poem based on Lewis Carroll's classic poem "Jabberwocky," while Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" becomes a poem about studying dinosaurs year after year in school.

Booklist critic Carolyn Phelan called the book "intelligent, irreverent, inviting, and downright irresistible. Picasso's curse will soon be forthcoming. Sieruta commented, "Scieszka's clever verses … relate simple scientific concepts about topics such as precipitation, the food chain, and atoms, while demonstrating a neat awareness of how kids think.

Science Verse also comes with an audio recording of Smith and Scieszka reading the poetry aloud, and having fun improvising comedy between the poems. When I taught third and fourth grades, I couldn't find cool-looking books to hand to boys, who, for the most part, were reluctant readers and didn't want to be seen as dummies. But still make 'em short enough, action-packed enough, disgusting enough.

The series takes the three boys, Joe, Fred, and Sam, by way of a magical Book, to the court of King Arthur in Knights of the Kitchen Table, to face the pirate Black-beard in The Not-So-Jolly Roger, into the distant future to meet their own descendants in , and through bizarre encounters with characters from classic children's stories in Summer Reading Is Killing Me!

Scieszka creates outlines for the books of his Time Warp Trio series for structural reasons. When writing other books, however, he says, "Anything goes. Middle first, sometimes end, sometimes title, sometimes punchline. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. American children's writer and reading advocate born Personal life [ edit ]. Professional life [ edit ]. Books [ edit ]. Picture books [ edit ]. Series [ edit ]. The Time Warp Trio [ edit ]. Trucktown [ edit ].