The Z Was Zapped
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The Z Was Zapped
''The Z Was Zapped'' () is a picture book by the American author Chris Van Allsburg originally published in 1987 by Houghton Mifflin. The book tells the story "in 26 acts", each showing how each letter in the alphabet caught some bad luck. The artwork has a stark look by using black and white pencil drawings. Each destruction of the letters take place on a proscenium A proscenium ( grc-gre, προσκήνιον, ) is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch (whether or not truly "arched") and on the bottom by the stage floor ... theater stage. Examples: * The A was in an avalanche. * The B was badly bitten. * The C was cut to ribbons. * The Z was zapped. References 1987 children's books American picture books Alphabet books Picture books by Chris Van Allsburg Houghton Mifflin books {{edu-book-stub acquisition-stub ...
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Chris Van Allsburg
Chris Van Allsburg (born June 18, 1949) is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He has won two Caldecott Medals for U.S. picture book illustration, for ''Jumanji'' (1981) and ''The Polar Express'' (1985), both of which he also wrote, and were later adapted as successful motion pictures. He was also a Caldecott runner-up in 1980 for ''The Garden of Abdul Gasazi''. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, he was a 1986 U.S. nominee for the biennial International Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan in April 2012. Life and career Van Allsburg was born on June 18, 1949 to a Dutch family in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, the second child of Doris Christianen and Richard Van Allsburg. He has a sister named Karen, born in 1947. His family lived in an old farmhouse, but when he was three years old, they m ...
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Children's Literature
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader. Children's literature can be traced to traditional stories like fairy tales, that have only been identified as children's literature in the eighteenth century, and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the fifteenth century much literature has been aimed specifically at children, often with a moral or religious message. Children's literature has been shaped by religious sources, like Puritan traditions, or by more philosophical and scienti ...
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Fantasy Novel
Fantasy literature is literature set in an imaginary universe, often but not always without any locations, events, or people from the real world. Magic, the supernatural and magical creatures are common in many of these imaginary worlds. Fantasy literature may be directed at both children and adults. Fantasy is a subgenre of speculative fiction and is distinguished from the genres of science fiction and horror by the absence of scientific or macabre themes, respectively, though these genres overlap. Historically, most works of fantasy were written, however, since the 1960s, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music and art. Many fantasy novels originally written for children and adolescents also attract an adult audience. Examples include ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'', the '' Harry Potter'' series, '' The Chronicles of Narnia'', and ''The Hobbit''. History Beginnings Stories invo ...
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Houghton Mifflin
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in ''the A* search algorithm'' or '' C*-algebra''). In English, an asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces, and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words. In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication. History The asterisk has already been used as a symbol in ice age cave paintings. There is also a two thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the , , which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is kn ...
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Hardcover
A hardcover, hard cover, or hardback (also known as hardbound, and sometimes as case-bound) book is one bound with rigid protective covers (typically of binder's board or heavy paperboard covered with buckram or other cloth, heavy paper, or occasionally leather). It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Modern hardcovers may have the pages glued onto the spine in much the same way as paperbacks. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are often printed on acid-free paper, and they are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible, easily damaged paper covers. Hardcover books are marginally more costly to manufacture. Hardcovers are frequently protected by artistic dust jackets, but a "jacketless" alternative has increased in popularity: these "paper-over-board" or "jacketless" hardcover bindings forgo the dust jacket in favor of printing the cove ...
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The Stranger (Chris Van Allsburg Book)
''The Stranger'' is a children's book written in 1986 by the American author Chris Van Allsburg. It tells a story of a stranger with no memory of who he is or where he is from. He recuperates in the home of a farmer and his family during the fall season. Plot One fall day, while Farmer Bailey is riding down the road in his truck, he hears a thump. At first, he thinks he had run over a deer, but when he gets out to see what he hit, he finds that he has accidentally run over a man. The man tries to leave, but loses his balance and falls down again where he and his wife, Mrs. Bailey, discovers that the stranger cannot talk. The Baileys call a doctor to examine him. The doctor arrives and takes the stranger's temperature with her thermometer. As the doctor holds it up to his mouth, the stranger blows on it and the mercury inside freezes. The doctor thinks that the thermometer is broken. Although the stranger isn't seriously hurt, he can't remember who he is or where he is from. The ...
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Two Bad Ants
''Two Bad Ants'' is a 1988 children's book written and illustrated by American author Chris Van Allsburg. Plot summary The title characters, while journeying through a human home, decide to exploit a sugar bowl—full of sugar cubes—on their own rather than taking one sugar cube for themselves like the colony's queen (so each of the ants get one sugar cube and so does the queen ant). The two ants decide that instead of taking one sugar cube for themselves (like the other ants) and leave for their ant hill, they will live in the sugar bowl forever and "eat the tasty treasure forever". But during daylight, the ants are shoveled up by a giant sugar bowl spoon. They experience misadventures: they land in a cup of coffee (after a giant spoon shovels up the sugar cubes into the coffee and gets the ants out), almost get toasted on an English muffin (after mistaking it for a giant disc—a "hiding place disc"—with holes), fall into a sink, get threatened by its garbage disposal un ...
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Proscenium
A proscenium ( grc-gre, προσκήνιον, ) is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch (whether or not truly "arched") and on the bottom by the stage floor itself, which serves as the frame into which the audience observes from a more or less unified angle the events taking place upon the stage during a theatrical performance. The concept of the fourth wall of the theatre stage space that faces the audience is essentially the same. It can be considered as a social construct which divides the actors and their stage-world from the audience which has come to witness it. But since the curtain usually comes down just behind the proscenium arch, it has a physical reality when the curtain is down, hiding the stage from view. The same plane also includes the drop, in traditional theatres of modern times, from the stage level to the "stalls" level of the audience, which was the original meaning of t ...
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1987 Children's Books
File:1987 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes after leaving the Port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, killing 193; Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, killing everyone except a little girl; The King's Cross fire kills 31 people after a fire under an escalator flashes-over; The MV Doña Paz sinks after colliding with an oil tanker, drowning almost 4,400 passengers and crew; Typhoon Nina strikes the Philippines; LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 crashes outside of Warsaw, taking the lives of all aboard; The USS Stark is struck by Iraqi Exocet missiles in the Persian Gulf; U.S. President Ronald Reagan gives a famous speech, demanding that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tears down the Berlin Wall., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Zeebrugge disaster rect 200 0 400 200 Northwest Airlines Flight 255 rect 400 0 600 200 King's Cross fire rect 0 200 300 400 Tear down this wall! rect 300 200 60 ...
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American Picture Books
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * B ...
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Alphabet Books
An alphabet book is a type of children's book giving basic instruction in an alphabet. Intended for young children, alphabet books commonly use pictures, simple language and alliteration to aid language learning. Alphabet books are published in several languages, and some distinguish the capitals and lower case letters in a given alphabet. Some alphabet books are intended for older audiences, using the simplicity of the genre as a device to convey humor or other concepts. Purposes Alphabet books introduce the sounds and letters of an ordered alphabet. As elementary educational tools, Alphabet books provide opportunities for: #Developing conversations and proficiency in oral language #Increasing phonemic awareness #Teaching phonics #Making text connections (Activating prior knowledge) #Predicting (Text talk) #Building vocabulary #Inferencing / drawing conclusions #Sequencing #Identifying elements of story structure #Recognizing point of view #Visualizing setting (Time, p ...
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Picture Books By Chris Van Allsburg
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensional picture, that resembles a subject. In the context of signal processing, an image is a distributed amplitude of color(s). In optics, the term “image” may refer specifically to a 2D image. An image does not have to use the entire visual system to be a visual representation. A popular example of this is of a greyscale image, which uses the visual system's sensitivity to brightness across all wavelengths, without taking into account different colors. A black and white visual representation of something is still an image, even though it does not make full use of the visual system's capabilities. Images are typically still, but in some cases can be moving or animated. Characteristics Images may be two or three-dimensional, such as a pho ...
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