Earle Dickson’s wife Josephine has many kitchen injuries – cuts, burns, and scrapes. To help her Earle creates a cover to protect the injury that eventually becomes Band-Aid by Johnson and Johnson. Johnson and Johnson develops a market by providing them free to the Boy Scouts.
Barry Wittenstein, ©2018, Charlesbridge, 978-1-58089-745-7
Writing: Playing with the Structure
The most fun of this book is the series of endings—six times in the course of the book when a logical pause in the plot occurs, the author says “The End.” But when the page is turned over the plot continues! Phrases that restart the plot are “Actually, that was just the beginning,” “But WAIT,” “Oops, not yet,” “Sorry, not really.”
Students could start by writing a story, following the basic story plot of a problem, with three attempts to solve it, before succeeding. When the draft is finished, they could enlarge and expand it, by adding details of conversation, and including “The End” at each of the attempts to solve it then continuing on the next page with why that solution does not work.
Because of COVID-19
We have discovered during the pandemic, many adults don’t seem understand what a vaccination is and does. We attribute it often to the fact that in their lifetime and even their parent’s lifetime, they did not experience or see anyone who caught the many diseases that vaccination prevents. They have not experienced polio, measles, mumps, rubella, small pox, etc. and don’t know anyone who did. There’s a meme going around saying:
“Remember when you caught polio?”
“Of course you don’t. Your parents vaccinated you.”
So, if you did a small presentation about how vaccines work first, you could then assign pairs of students to study the 15 diseases for which we have vaccines—all developed since about 1920. If each pair took one disease, they could present on the following topics:
- What is the disease and its effects?
- How many people used to catch it?
- How many people suffer long term effects from it or die?
- Who developed the vaccine and when, and how?
Students could prepare a collective report—each pair preparing a two-page presentation with images. That project could be bound and catalogued for the library. Then students could prepare an oral presentation for their disease to help developing speaking skills.
Possibilities include:
- Insulin
- Tuberculosis
- Diphtheria
- Tetanus (lock jaw)
- Pertussis – whooping cough
- Penicillin (great antibiotic, not a vaccine)
- Yellow Fever
- Smallpox
- Shingles
- Measles
- Mumps
- Hepatitis A and B
- Polio
- Chicken Pox
- (You could include the COVID-19 vaccines if you like)
My Personal Timeline: Writing
The back of the book has a timeline for the major events of Earle Dickson’s life with a focus on his career with Johnson and Johnson. It might be an interesting project for students to write their own timeline, starting from their birth, kindergarten, grade one, etc. and also including any major events in each year.
For more creative writing ideas, click The Boo-Boos that Changed the World to download.
Mr. Mutt is the Ann Landers of dogs. Six dogs write in with their problems, and receive answers from Mr. Mutt, along with critiques from The Queen (a cat with a point of view. Answers are accompanied by cute graphs, useful for teaching graphing to students. It also closes with two newspaper articles as the cats attack Mr. Mutt.
Ralph Raccoon is too polite and too nice. His parents have to send him to Bandit School to learn to be a proper bad raccoon. How does Ralph use his “niceness” to succeed?
The Being Bad Alphabet
The pea under the mattress writes a memoir of his attempt to help the prince find a “real princess.” Eventually the gardener’s girl who raised the pea lies on the twenty mattresses and he whispers, “You are very uncomfortable,” in her ear all night. She repeats this to the queen in the morning and marries the prince. The pea lives on in the royal museum.
Diana Cruchley 