The Cat Ate My Gymsuit Read Online Free Page B

after watching all of them we talked about how they worked or didn’t work.
    Writing a children’s book was another assignment. First we talked about what kinds of things were important, like plot, theme, time, place, and stuff like that. Then we each wrote a story and gave it to Ms. Finney to be typed up. After that we illustrated them. She taught us how to bind them into books. When we finished, she tried to get school time off to use our books in a special project. But Stone wouldn’t give it to us, so we met on a Saturday at our town hospital. We visited little kids who were sick, read our stories to them, and then left the books there so that the hospital would always have books for the kids to read. Some of the class even asked for and got permission to visit every Saturday.
    Another time, we talked about humor, satire, and parody. We decided to write our own television show, and called it
Dr. Sickbee at Your Service.
It was the story of an orthodontist who moonlights in a rock band, lives next door to a weird family, has a younger sister who ran away to join the roller derby, and solves mysteries in his spare time. We put it on videotape and picked out the best of the book commercials to use with it, and some of the other English teachers let their classes see it.
    Once we had to learn a list of literary terms, vocabulary and spelling words, and parts of speech. I spent a whole weekend studying because I figured that the test was going to be a killer. Getting to class, we saw that Ms. Finney had made up a large game board that read “This Way to Tenth Grade.” Each row was a team. We rolled a die and landed on one of the categories. If we answered correctly, we got to stay there. If not, we had to go back. There were all sorts of penalty cards, like “Missed the bus,” “Wait one turn,” “Your locker is messy. Lose two turns cleaning it,” “Talking during assembly. Go back three steps.” The first team to make it to the end graduated to tenth grade.
    Another time, we walked in and there was aweird-looking guy standing with Ms. Finney. He wore a trenchcoat and a cap, and had a pipe.
    “Class. I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Sherlock Houses, the defective detective.”
    “Hi, kids. I have a problem, and Ms. Finney says that you’re pretty smart and can help me. You see, I’m working on The Case of the Missing Drummer.”
    “I’d rather work on The Case of the Missing Beer.”
    “Cool it, Robert,” said Ms. Finney with a smile.
    Sherlock continued. “The kidnappers left a ransom note. But I accidentally spilled coffee on it, and some of the words are blurred. Could you help me figure it out?”
    We groaned but agreed to play their game, and Sherlock and Ms. Finney handed out copies of the note with certain words messed up. We spent the rest of the period trying to figure out the missing words.
    At the end of the period, Ms. Finney told us that Sherlock was really a friend of hers from graduate school and that what we had done was an exercise in understanding words in context.
    It was fun.

CHAPTER 7
    W e should have guessed that Smedley and Ms. Finney were too good to last. There were all sorts of clues. We noticed that the principal came in to observe quite often. But they sometimes do that with new teachers. We were extra good when he was there. After all, it was Ms. Finney’s first year as a teacher, and we saw that she got kind of nervous when someone came in to check her out. So we tried to remember to raise our hands and wait to be calledon. Ms. Finney always said hand raising wasn’t necessary if we all respected one another.
    One day Mr. Stone walked in, sat down in the back, and put his clipboard down on the desk.
    We had been working when he came in, but everyone stopped.
    Ms. Finney said, “Let’s continue. Who knows what images are used in this story?”
    Seven hands were raised. Robert Alexander waved his.
    “All right. Give one example, Robert.”
    “He’s stubborn as