Mr. Wuffles, David Wiesner

Mr. Wuffles is a picture book from the Science Fiction genre.  It is about a cat named Mr. Wuffles and a group of aliens in a spaceship that somehow ended up on earth.  Mr. Wuffles found a spaceship toy that he liked and he began rolling it around that happened to be the spaceship that the aliens were in.  Mr. Wuffles falls asleep and the aliens are dizzy and tired and everything is broken in the spaceship from all of the rolling around.  They get out and Mr. Wuffles almost squishes them so they run under a dresser full of bugs they all make a pact and plot a plan to get Mr. Wuffles.  They set up a trap and got back on the spaceship and fly out the window.  It is a great book for a Science Fiction picture book and I think that students would really enjoy the book.

This is a really interesting book.  The text is written in quote bubbles.  However, most of it is like a wordless picture book because Wiesner has the aliens speaking their own language and not English.  So for one activity I might would do with students in have them write down all the different characters that the aliens use in their dialogue and have the students create an alphabet for the aliens.  Then I could put them in groups and have each group take a page and write down what they think the aliens are saying.  Another activity I may do is as a class do a venn diagram for compare and contrast of Hocus Pocus because the book has the same theme of the thrill of the chase like Mr. Wuffles.   This is a great book to base different activities off of.