Tag Archives: Captain Underpants

30 TIPS for Writing Delightful Children’s Books Day 10

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WRITING CHILDREN’S BOOKS TIP #10: HUMOUR

Children love to laugh!! Do you want to write stories that children will love and read over and over and over again? Do you want to delight your readers and make them crave your stories? Yes?

Make your stories funny! Yes, make children laugh!

TIPS FOR WRITING HUMOUROUS STORIES FOR CHILDREN

  • Use humorous experiences from every day life. Think of funny things that have happened to you, your friends and family. Tweak them a bit and use them! See picture book, The End of Something Wonderful: A Practical Guide to a Backyard Funeral.
  • Please please please keep the jokes as short as possible.
  • Surprise your readers! See picture book, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates
  • Bathroom humour: Stories featuring body sounds are a hit with younger children especially books with farts and burps! See chapter book Gangster Granny by David Walliams PS: Don’t go over the top!
  •  Stories where children play pranks on or triumph over adults: See Captain Underpants
  • Exaggerate, yes, stretch regular situations to the point of absolute silliness!  
  • Create absolutely totally ROTFL funny whacky characters
  • Wordplay!! Try these and some sarcasm too to score high points with your readers!

Remember, don’t try too hard! There’s nothing more annoying than an overstressed joke.

NB: Humour can also be used to write about tough topics to make them easier for young readers to digest. The best example of this is Stephanie Lucianovic’s The End of Something Wonderful: A Practical Guide to a Backyard Funeral.

Here are some of my all-time favourites:

Picture Books

  • B J Novak. The Book with No Pictures.
  • Mo, Willem. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.
  • Ryan T Higgins. We Don’t Eat Our Classmates

Chapter Books

  • Dav Pilky, The Captain Underpants Series
  • Peggy Parish, The Amelia Bedelia Series

Middle Grade

Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from the Wayside School

  1. Action: Read like a Writer

Identify the funniest books you’ve read and try to figure out the elements the author utilized to make you laugh. Can you see any of the tips above?

2. Read.

So, want to write a funny story? Start reading. You can start with some of the books on my list. 😊

Want to write a story for children, don’t know where to start? Tell me all about it and we can figure out the theme and some mentor texts for you!

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Photo credit: www.amazon.com   

Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants

AGES 4 - 8, AGES 8 - 12, BOOK REVIEW, , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Title: Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants

Author: Dav Pilkey

Publisher: Scholastic

Number of pages: 160

Type of Book: Fiction; Graphic Novel

Age: 7 – 10

Available here: http://www.learnington-ng.com/literature/456-roald-dahl-s-mischief-and-mayhem.html?search_query=captain+underpants&results=6; http://www.amazon.com/Captain-Underpants-Perilous-Professor-Poopypants/dp/0439049989/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1448348696&sr=1-1&keywords=Captain+underpants+book+4

Price: N2000; $5.99

MY SUMMARY

This is one of the quirkiest books I have EVER read! George and Harold are two friends who like to ‘liven things up’ and inadvertently get into a LOT of trouble. In this book, they drive their new science teacher, maniacal mad-scientist, Professor Poopypants crazy and he decides to take over the world in the funniest/silliest way possible. Read it to find out how George, Harold and Captain Underpants try to stop Professor Poopypants and his perilous plan.

THUMBS UP AND DOWN

UP: The Flip-O-Rama!!! I love books with activities for readers. It makes them more interactive and automatically more interesting. I also loved the fact that George and Harold wrote, photocopied and sold comic books to their schoolmates. This brought back pleasant memories of primary school. I made good money from my classmates by selling my stories to them every week! Another highlight was the fact that the book introduces a moral in a very subtle way. It encourages kids/people not to laugh at other people. I also loved the names of the citizens of New SwissLand.

DOWN: It was a bit too silly.

RATING

4 Stars

TRIVIA

  1. Who was Captain Underpants, the underwear-wearing super hero? Krupp, the Principal of Jerome Horwitz Elementary School.    
  2. Why did Professor Pippy Pee-Pee Poopypants get so angry that he went crazy? Because George and Harold made a comic book that made fun of him.
  3. What was the perilous plot of Professor Poopypants? To take over the world and get everyone to change their names so that everyone would have silly names like him.
  4. What is the moral of the story? It’s not nice to make fun of people.
  5. Why did Mr. Fyde the science teacher resign? Because he thought he was going crazy.
  6. How did George and Harold get back at their teachers and principal for laughing at them and stopping them from going on the field trip? They went into the teacher’s lounge, taped the tap’s spray handle on the ‘on’ position, poured powdered soap flakes on the blades of the ceiling fan, and filled the fridge with white Styrofoam pellets. When the teachers came back into the lounge and turned the tap and fan on, they were first soaked, then covered with soapy powder which soon turned to paste because of the water and then when the fridge was opened, the fan blew the foam pellets all over the room and they landed on the teacher’s sticky bodies, making them look like a group of giant evil snowmen.

Visit George, Harold and Captain Underpants here: www.pilkey.com and here: http://emea.scholastic.com/en/captain-underpants

CHALLENGE: Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants  

CREATE (WRITE or DRAW)

  1. What is a Flip-O-Rama? Write a 400-word essay

 OR

  1. Make a Flip-O-Rama.

Plus:

            1a. OR 2a. What is the chapter after the chapter before the last chapter?

Send your answers to ugochinyelu.anidi@gmail.com (NB: If you make a Flip-O-Rama, take a picture of your Flip-O-Rama and send it to the email address above)

Entry requirements: Entrants must be within the 7 – 10 age range. The first correct entry will be announced on this page and will win a copy of this book.

Answers must be submitted before 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, November 29th 2015

Next Book of the Week:

AFRO: THE GIRL WITH THE MAGICAL HAIR by Okechukwu Ofili

TNT

Dorky DiaperLips (My new name courtesy of Professor Poopypants)