![]() ![]() ![]() “I was very nervous about it, because I didn’t know if I could do this-to combine all these things,” Cole admitted. She also knew she’d have to boil down complicated ideas into terms any child could understand-without boring her young readers. Cole knew from the start that her story needed to be funny and informative in equal measure. The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks was a difficult juggling act. Joanna Cole procrastinated before writing the first Magic School Bus book. The name Frizzle itself was also a portmanteau of frizz and drizzle, which Cole reportedly came up with on a rainy day. “She didn’t stop to make sure that we understood everything. Frizzle is based on my junior high school science teacher, who was always running ahead,” Cole said in a 2007 interview with. Degen and Cole have also each cited a teacher from their respective childhoods as inspiring some of Ms. Frizzle after a beloved, eccentric second-grade teacher from his childhood school. Readers from around the world fell in love with both the book and its red-headed protagonist. Their first installment, The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks, was released in 1986. To helm his new franchise, Walker hired offbeat illustrator Bruce Degen and science/humor writer Joanna Cole. Frizzle, is a composite of several real-life people. I thought about doing books about kids going on field trips to places they really couldn’t: through a water system, to the bottom of the ocean, inside the Earth.” 2. One day, inspiration struck when Walker remembered how much he’d enjoyed school trips as a boy. “So we had the breakthrough idea of putting curriculum science inside a story.” “In the 1980s, during the great era for picture book sales, we kept getting requests from teachers who were interested in seeing more books in the science category,” Craig Walker, the late former vice president of Scholastic, Inc., told Publisher’s Weekly in 2006. Eventually, educators started asking publishers to fill the void. Tales like Ramona Quimby, Age 8 were helpful for English teachers, but science instructors were still left without entertaining reads for their students. Still, certain subjects remained largely ignored. Seuss and Beverly Cleary had produced energizing page-turners that kids actually wanted to read. An editor’s love of field trips inspired the premise of The Magic School Bus.īy the 1980s, educational children’s books had come a long way. Take a ride down memory lane with these fun facts about The Magic School Bus. Frizzle and her trusty vehicle transported kids and kids-at-heart into the wonderful world of science. Frizzle? Brought to life by children’s author Joanna Cole-who died on July 12, 2020, at 75 years old-and illustrator Bruce Degen, Ms. ![]()
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