Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster By: Debra Frazier

Frasier, D. (2000). Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster. Harcourt.

In this picture book, author and illustrator Debra Frazier rolls out the creativity with both the choices of vocabulary play on words and the technique selected that is unique. Frazier draws with markers on notebook paper and cuts out several components for each spread and affixes them to the background of color. My second graders thought that was really interesting, because they were amazed at the neatness and creativity. The story revolves around a main character, Sage, who falls ill and misses the day of school when vocabulary words for the week are given out. Her best friend, Starr, gives them to her on the phone while in a rush, and she incorrectly hears the last word miscellaneous which meaning is foreign to her as “Miss Alaineus.” Sage tries to take shortcuts with defining the words by making up the definitions in her own wording rather than using the dictionary, and when she comes to Miss Alaineus, she thinks back on her “prior knowledge” of a year ago when she was grocery shopping with her mom, and her mother went to go pick up “miscellaneous” things for a spaghetti dinner. Sage thought the lady with flowing hair like spaghetti was THE “Miss Alaineus,” and so she wrote about that as the definition of the incorrect word. Of course, at the next Vocabulary Bee, Sage is given miscellaneous as a word to spell in front of the whole class, and she is humiliated when she realizes her error. In the end, when time for the Vocabulary Parade comes around, Sage makes lemonade out of lemons and dresses up as “Miss Alaineus – Queen of All Miscellaneous Things!” With her trophy in hand for most original use of a word , Sage realizes that life marches on after an embarrassing blunder.

As a great aficionado of details in visuals and the written word, I love how Frazier incorporates sentences that Sage wrote which uses three vocabulary words that begin with the same letter as the alphabetic border of the text throughout the layout of the book. I also appreciated Frazier’s creativity when she used vocabulary words as part of the storyline in an innovative, double meaning kind of way, and wrote the words in bold print with the definition following it. It reminds me a lot of how my students and I talk about vocabulary while we are reading a book, although we wait until at least the end of the sentence to discuss it. She also even makes a faux “Sage’s Vocabulary Parade Scrapbook” of her over the years in different, creative outfits (the one for “tension” is definitely innovative!) Seeing the assignments at the beginning and the end of the story gives background information and that feeling of getting to peek at things that you normally wouldn’t get to see. A creative, thought provoking book about vocabulary and the importance of words! Great text to text connections about vocabulary can be made with Miss Alaineus and Donovan’s Word Jar, written by Monalisa DeGross.