Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts!: The First Experiment

By Frances O'Roark Dowell and Preston McDaniels

HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PHINEAS L. MACGUIRE,
BOY-SCIENTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE, AKA MAC:

1. He's allergic to purple, telephone calls, and girls, and can prove it.

2. He's probably the world's expert on mold, including which has the highest stink potential.

3. He does not have a best friend. He does, however, have an un-best friend, who he does not -- repeat, not -- want to upgrade to best-friend status.

But disaster strikes when his teacher pairs Mac and his un-best friend together for the upcoming science fair. Worse, this un-best friend wants the project to be on dinosaurs, which is so third grade. Worse still, it seems as though everyone else in his class finds the un-best friend as unlikable as Mac does. But, being a boy-scientist, once Mac notices this, he just might have to do some investigating.

This very funny young middle-grade novel includes tantalizingly grue- some experiments for exploding your own volcanoes and imploding marshmallows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aladdin
• Release date: Jun 23, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439107713

Frances O'Roark Dowell

Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award and the William Allen White Award; Where I’d Like to Be; The Secret Language of Girls and its sequels The Kind of Friends We Used to Be and The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away; Chicken Boy; Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Award; the Phineas L. MacGuire series; Falling In; The Second Life of Abigail Walker, which received three starred reviews; Anybody Shining; Ten Miles Past Normal; Trouble the Water; the Sam the Man series; The Class; How to Build a Story; and most recently, Hazard. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina. Connect with Frances online at FrancesDowell.com.

Book preview

chapter one

My name is Phineas Listerman MacGuire.

Most people call me Mac.

It’s okay if you call me Phin.

You can even call me Phineas.

Forget about calling me Listerman.

I am allergic to fifteen things. My mom says this is not true, that I’m only allergic to two things, peanuts and cat hair. But I am a scientist, and she’s not. I have scientific proof that it makes me itchy to think about the following items:

Avocados Yogurt, any flavor Cottage cheese Grape jelly Any kind of kissing, especially when there’s lipstick Celery Purple flowers Purple Magic Markers Purple crayons Anything purple Moist towelettes in foil packs Telephone calls All girls

I started fourth grade three weeks ago. When I started, I had a best friend. His name was Marcus Ballou. Marcus is also a scientist. We were a scientific team. We specialized in volcanoes, caves, fossils, all insects, and the solar system. But mostly volcanoes.

We have made and erupted over eighty-seven volcanoes in our lifetime. It’s very simple. You take an empty soda bottle (big) and put it in a baking pan (also big). Fill the bottle with lots of baking soda and four or five squirts of dishwashing liquid.

Then add vinegar and stand back.

You should do it outside, in case you were wondering. Unless you have a less irritated mom than mine. Then maybe you could do it on the kitchen table. If you’re like me and spill stuff everywhere even when you’re trying really hard to be careful, you should definitely do it at a friend’s house.

Here is the problem with Marcus: He moved. To Lawrence, Kansas. This is bad for at least two reasons. Now we aren’t a scientific team anymore. Also, he waited until the second week of school to move. If he had moved before school started, then I would have known to look around for a new best friend on the first day.

But I didn’t know to do this. I still had Marcus.

Everybody knew that me and Marcus were best friends and a scientific team. No one else tried to be best friends with us. They picked other best friends.

Here’s what you would hear all the time:

Mac and Marcus

Mac and Marcus

Mac and Marcus

Now all you hear is:

Mac

Mac

Mac

Scientifically speaking, it’s a pretty lonely sound.

chapter two

I do not have a best friend. I do have an un-best friend.

Here is the weird thing: His name is also Mac. Mac Robbins, known as Mac R. in our class, since we have two Macs. He moved here this year from Seattle, Washington.

The first day of school our teacher, Mrs. Tuttle, made the three new kids stand up in front of the class, one at a time and say a few words about themselves. Two of the kids shuffled their feet and said where they used to live and stuff like their hobbies were playing on their Game Boys and watching TV and their favorite class was lunch.

Mac R. did not shuffle his feet. He looked everybody straight in the eye and said, I am from Seattle, Washington. Everything is better in Seattle, including the ice cream, the road signs, and the television shows.

Then he said children from Seattle, Washington, are naturally geniuses. He said children from our state are not.

Quite a first impression, Mac R., Mrs. Tuttle said when Mac R. was done making everyone in our class automatically hate him. She took one of the rubber frogs from the rubber frog collection she keeps on her desk and put it on her head to put us in a better mood.

It didn’t work. We still hated Mac R. And it got worse. The next day he tripped Chester Oliphant on his way to the pencil sharpener. Chester is the size of a kindergartner, but he’s the funniest kid in our class, so everyone likes him and sticks up for him out on the playground. He is the wrong person in our class to pick on.

Mac R. said it was an accident, but nobody believed him. Marcus, who only had three days left at our school before going to Lawrence, Kansas, said having Mac R. in our class almost made him glad he was moving away.

Two days after that Mac R. wore a Woodbrook Elementary School T-shirt, only he’d put a big red circle around the school logo and then a slash through the circle. It was like he wished our whole school didn’t even exist.

We felt the same way about him.

When I first heard there was another Mac in the fourth grade, I was interested from a scientific angle. I had never met another Mac

Reviews for Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts!

[robertalea-223265 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wish I had these books back when I was an elementary teacher. They are great!

[melissasiobhan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mac is about to start the fourth grade, but his best friend moved away right before the first day of school. Mac is a scientist, and so was his best friend. Now he finds himself without a best friend and a science partner. Mac is a self proclaimed scientist and is allergic to the color purple. He looks at everything in his world through the perspective of a scientist. A new student comes into Mac's class during the first week of school, and his name is Mac R. Mac does not like this Mac R. Of course, the two get paired together to complete a science fair project. Mac and Mac R. have to learn to work together so they can complete their science project. This is a great text for grades 3-6. The scientific language adds some complexity to the text, but it is still accessible for this age group. I would use this text as a mentor text for learning about scientific language and the scientific process. It could be read either before learning about scientific language or during the unit in science. I think this text could be particularly helpful in learning about scientific observations and theories. I would use this to help children begin learning about the how the scientific process fits into daily life. Children would write down things that they observed occurring in their daily lives that they think would involve science. Then the children would write down their theories about why they think they saw that in their observation.

[tzaleski_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book makes Science Fair projects cool for everyone! Main character, Phineas, even explains the two different types of projects, which many of my students have a difficult time understanding. He models how to be inquisitive about your enviroment and even includes directions for two experiments in the post pages of the book. Good lessons/themes in asking questions, giving people a second chance, and making the best of your situation.