Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice-for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense.

(Film rights to Universal)Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. The Chicago landscape, meantime, is dimly glimpsed, and the climactic, glass-shattering shoot-out on top of the Sears Tower seems lifted from the Die Hard movies. Though hastily rendered, Agent Jefferson and Simon nonetheless become anchors in the resulting storm of bloodshed as people are killed off as fast as they're introduced. In a story crammed with too many characters, most of them villains speaking in clipped, enigmatic bureaucratese, Pearson's plot takes a while to work up to speed. Agent Jefferson becomes a target for warring government bureaucracies, as well as a possible meal for Kimura, when he protects the now-orphaned Simon from yet another enemy, a diabolical computer-hacker known only as Rothchild. Meanwhile, Keiko Kimura, a Japanese terrorist who tortures and cannibalizes her victims, comes to America to steal the government code.

(The code had been dropped into the magazine to test its supposed invulnerability.) A tracer on the call alerts a series of fiendish bureaucrats, one of whom dispatches an assassin to Simon's address. The number rings into a top-secret National Security Agency spy den that has just spent $10 billion developing this code for use in all sensitive government communications. Given a magazine of puzzles to solve, Simon decodes a series of numbers that instructs him to call an 800 number to receive a prize. Among Anne's patients is Simon Lynch, a cute, childlike, Dustin Hoffmanstyle autistic teenager with astounding mathematical abilities. In this fourth outing, African-American FBI agent Art Jefferson, who previously saved America from a bomb-throwing white supremacist (Capitol Punishment, 1995), has recovered from a heart attack and is now happily married to child-psychologist Anne.

Word study - phonic knowledge, compound words, rhyming word, contractions etc.A crowded, violent thriller involving an autistic boy who effortlessly cracks a supposedly unbreakable government communications code-and then becomes the target of murderous villainy from shady Washington spies and a sadistic Japanese hit- woman.

Talk about interesting/challenging words and discuss what they mean.

Look at print and conventions (bold, italics).

Recognise and use a variety of punctuation when reading.

Re-read the song lyrics and ask children to join in.

Read the song lyrics - ask children a variety of questions.

Sing and read along to the YouTube song to achieve multi-sensory learning 'Do it, see it and hear it!'.Ask if I had $10.00 and it costs $2.00 to buy a pie how many pies can I buy? 5 Or if it cost $5.00 to buy a pie how many pies can I buy? 2 See if other 's can guess what your rhyme is? 'Mime your Own Rhyme' Choose a rhyme and act it out.Play the song again and sing along as with the song according to the solo and group parts. Choose a solo singer the rest of the class is the group.Ask children to listen to the song and ask children if they can recognize when the children sing as a choir and when there is a solo singer?.

Simple simon