English 230 - Illustrated Books

 
The Magic School Bus®
 Joanna Cole
(1944- )
and Bruce Degen
(1945- )
 
    Joanna Cole says she loved science as a child and modeled Ms. Frizzle's character on one of her teachers: "She loved her subject. Every week she had a child do an experiment in front of the room and I wanted to be that child every week." (Magic School Bus® website)  (The physical appearance of Ms. Frizzle is based on Bruce Degen's high-school geometry teacher.)  Cole worked as an elementary school teacher, a librarian, and a children's book editor before beginning to write children's books. Her first book was Cockroaches, which she wrote because there had never been a book written about the insect before.  So far, she has written more than 90 children's books, including eight Magic School Bus® books.  Although her books include fairy tales and children's stories, she says that she always considered herself primarily a science writer (Cole 1996).  Her works have been widely praised for scientific accuracy and the clear, easily understood explanations of complicated subjects.
     Although not formally trained in illustration, Bruce Degen studied art at Cooper Union (New York City) and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and has taught art both to children and adults.  He has illustrated books for a number of other writers, including Jane Yolen (Commander Toad series) and Nancy White Carlstrom (Jesse Bear series) as well as the Magic School Bus® books.
    Cole began to develop the Magic School Bus® series after here editor at Scholastic Press suggested "a humorous book about a teacher who takes her class on magical field trips to learn about science" (Cole 1996).  The editor put her together with Degen, already a successful illustrator for work such as the Commander Toad series by Jane Yolen (Children's Literature Review 40:2).
     When working on a Magic School Bus®, Cole does the original research and creates a "dummy book" with ideas for pictures and the story's text, divided into speech balloons, main narrative, and "student" reports.  After the dummy is finished, Degen makes preliminary sketches and a layout of how the book will appear; then author and illustrator get together to develop the final version of the book.  Then, before publication, the book is sent to experts in the field for fact checking.
    The first Magic School Bus® book was At the Waterworks, the topic chosen because, Cole says, "I wanted to make it fun. I wanted the kids to be going someplace they wouldn't normally want to go, and I wanted Ms. Frizzle to be as enthusiastic as any science enthusiast can be." (Magic School Bus® website)   To date, more than one million (1,000,000) copies of series books are in print.

    Although I treat the Magic School Bus books under the "non-fiction" category, on the principle that their primary purpose is to convey information, they do, of course, include a fictional story - indeed, an outright fantasy.  Colman cautions teachers about books that are labeled as nonfiction but contain "made-up material":

   "In the world of literature for young readers...books that blur the boundaries are unquestioningly accepted as nonfiction, or informational, by many reviewers, award committees, librarians, and teachers." (260)

She specifically include the Magic School Bus books in this group, although she notes that they do point out that parts of the books are made up - creating what she terms "hybrid books."  (The books in this series are somewhat inconsistent, however; while some of the later books in particular include fairly detailed end notes identifying what is fact from what is fantasy, others - e.g., The Magic Schoolbus Lost in the Solar System - have a significantly less detailed explanation.)  Colman worries, however, that these efforts to point out fictional material are frequently overlooked by teachers using the books (and by young readers, for that matter).
 
Specific works:

Sources: Joanna Cole with Wendy Saul, On the Bus with Joanna Cole: A Creative Autobiography (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996); Penny Colman, "A New Way to Look at Literature: A Visual Model for Analyzing Fiction and Nonfiction Texts," Language Arts 84, 3 (January 2007) 257-268; Noel Perrin, "The Third Grade Goes to Space" in A Child's Delight (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth/University Press of New England, 1997) 11-15.

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Page last updated July 18, 2007