Fortunately, the Milk...

At Addlestone Library's Chatterbooks in October we discussed Fortunately, the Milk... by Neil Gaiman. This is a review by Maya, one of our 11 year old members, which sums up the general feeling of the book in our group:

"Personally, I didn't find this book that challenging, so I would aim this book for year 4 children (ages 8-9). Even though some parts in this book were humorous, the rest I found a bit childish.

If I had to choose who would be my favourite character it would probably be Tvilight Tina because she is suspicious. My least favourite character is Splod the God, I just find him creepy.

A few changes could make this book more interesting for me, like less pictures and more exciting vocabulary.

Finally, I would give this book 5 out of 10 stars."

Our activity for the month was making milk cartons out of card and then illustrating them in the way that they would illustrate the book. If you would also like to do this you can find the template here, along with lots of other Fortunately, the milk related activities: http://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/fortunately-the-milk-activity-pack-web.pdf

In Fortunately, the Milk the character Professor Steg uses descriptive names for objects. So for example she calls a coconut a 'hard-hairy-wet-white-cruncher'. Because of this I challenged the members of our group to come up with alternative names for every day items which the rest of the group had to guess what it was. Here are the names they came up with:

A tongue, tingly squashed thing in a glass

A chewy mouth thing

A yellow round thing

Big-wobbly-go-on-head-thing

Big metal box on wheels with a window

gardening object that squirts water

hot blowy air dry hair machine

slithering-scaly-slimy-thing

wordy picture page turner

Can you guess what any of them are?! Put your answers in the comment box!


Watch this space for the next instalment of Addlestone Chatterbooks Adventures on Awful Auntie by David Walliams...