THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

Start your experience of this story by introducing the kids to Norton Juster through this short video, which shares kid-friendly, interesting aspects of his life (this clip start at 1:42).

You’ll find a worksheet for author note-taking and conversation-starting in our printables set.

For further information

We encourage you to read through the interviews and biographical articles about Norton Juster in our Learning Links at the bottom of this page.

SUPPLIES (any or all)

• for DIY letters: alphabet cookies

• for half-baked ideas: squirtable cheese for writing on any flat bread

• for ragamuffins, muffins

• for synonym rolls: cinnamon rolls

• for rigamorales: dinner rolls

DIRECTIONS

Set up a booth at the Dictionopolis Word Market, and "sell" an assortment of goodies to your kids. Accept whatever verbal currency you'd like to collect—homonyms, synonyms, homophones, or Norton Juster's very favorite, PUNS!

You might offer Aunt Faintly Macabre’s sugar-coated punctuation marks, and some synonym buns from the royal banquet.  Rigamaroles and ragamuffins are other fun options, and cheesy half-baked ideas are always just a little too consumable for our taste, so to speak.

Sell DIY letters and have the kids describe how they taste. Is X really stale?  Is Z sawdusty? Is C extra crispy and crunchy?  There are so many delicious ways to eat your words!

Sign and quote are not included in our printables set

If you'd like to package up individual BookBites for your kids, you might like our fun labels for wrapping synonym buns and punctuation marks. (The box wrapper fits around a little box of Nerds candy, which word nerds will find quite appropriate as punctuation marks.)

Labels included in our printables set

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SETUP

We all love the idea of conducting color as if it were sound. You can play with that idea a little, and have the kids compose a conductor’s sound in color! Kids will feel the pleasure of responding to art, and of simultaneously creating art themselves. Because it’s “guided” by existing music, it’s not intimidating for anyone.

SUPPLIES

• loose assorted crayons piled in front of each child

• a stack of  staff paper for each child, included in our printables set

Tip:  You might want stacks of extra staff paper within easy reach, as some kids’ compositions are much longer than others--it all depends on how they “see” the sound!

DIRECTIONS

1. Read the description of Chroma the Great as he conducts and concludes the sunset. (If you have an extra few minutes, you might want to share what a conductor does.) Then tell the kids they get to play Chroma the Great — but instead of creating color in the sky with musical instruments, they’ll recreate music on paper with color instruments.

2.  Pass out the staff paper and have the kids write the title of the music and their name at the top.

3.  Explain that they’re going to listen to another conductor’s music, and translate what they hear into color. They’ll want to listen deeply and thoughtfully, grabbing whatever crayon (or multiple crayons) seem the color of the sound at the moment.  The color will change very often! Sometimes they’ll want to compose with two crayons at once.

Color won’t be their only way of expressing the music, either. Sometimes the color will be pressed down dark and sometimes hardly at all. It can run high or low on the staff, continuous or separate in places, swirly or speckled or loopy or sharp or wavy or jagged or flat. It will probably be ALL of those things at one point or another!  The color and the way it is colored will depend on the sound — and how the listener hears it.

Put the kids at ease about the “no wrong way” nature of this. It doesn’t matter what the person next to them is doing. The “key” to this musical art is the listener.  Each person will hear the same music, and yet interpret it differently. That’s the beauty of art!

4.  Play any recording of symphonic music. Here are a few recognizable pieces:

Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Finale  2:05
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee 3:21
Tizol’s Caravan 3:31
Bizet’s Farandole  3:50
Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik 6:24
Beethoven’s Symphony No 5, First movement 7:59
Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5, Allegro non troppo 10:53
Liszt’s Hungarian Raphsody No. 2  11:12

Tip:   It’s fascinating to keep an eye on the conductor and orchestra, but also too distracting for some. You might choose to use audio only, or have the kids turn their backs on the screen.

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DIRECTIONS

Start by having the kids come up with pairs of homophones like "cellar/seller," "reign/rain," "bare/bear," etc. Use that list to find familiar phrases, like "storm cellar" or "light rain" or "bare minimum."

Then turn those phrases into people or creatures, with a little more detail for fun. For example:

• The Storm Seller sells thunderclouds to kings who reign over dry kingdoms.    

• The Bear Minimum is a tiny lazy bear from Justenuff.

We could go on . . . really, we could. But you get it—and if you'd like a worksheet that spells this out for your kids, you got it.

This fun activity is easy and free—just play some weird sounds and let the kids guess what's causing them!

SUPPLIES

You'll need a way to play some recorded or online sounds. Here are a few suggestions from Freesound: 

• stirring macaroni and cheese   

•  water sloshing in the bathtub   

• a squeaky cupboard door   

• a pig grunting   

• walking in leaves

DIRECTIONS

1.  Read aloud the three “Have you ever heard?” questions Dr. Dischord asks Milo in “Dischord and Dynne,” about the slippered ant, blindfolded octopus, and square-wheeled steam roller.

2.  Tell the kids they’re going to hear some strange sounds and identify their causes creatively, beginning with “Have you ever heard?” just like Dr. Dischord.  Warn them that they’ll be tempted to name the literal sound (the effect), when what we want is the imaginative source (the cause).  Not “that’s someone breaking glass!” but “Have you ever heard a hundred elves hacking icicles off the eaves of Santa’s workshop?”

3.  Then play the sounds you've selected and have the kids guess what's causing them! Point out that they're putting their imaginations to play (not work) and coming up with clever connections—just like the author did.

They will, of course, hear MUCH better if they're wearing a pair of Dr. Dischord ears.  You'll find those in our printables set, just waiting to be cut out and taped to a plastic headband.

HAVE FUN!!!!

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This "translation" activity encourages imagination and listening from two different directions. First, find sounds that fit prewritten labels, then write labels to fit some found sounds!

Here's how that works.

DIRECTIONS

1. Give each child a bag of empty plastic test tubes straight from the good doctor's lab, and some labels. Some of the labels should have preprinted sounds, like those in our printables set, and some should be blank.

2. Have the kids look for things that make the noises written on the labels (your own, or our premade labels)—these are noises Dr. Dischord has asked the Awful Dynne to collect. What items would result in Swish sounds? Snaps and Crackles? Soft Cries? What collection of odds and ends would create Misc. Uproar?

3. After they've collected those noises, reverse the instructions. Instead of looking for noises to fit words on labels, now they have to find words to fit noises, and use blank labels to identify the sounds for Dr. Dischord.

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Kids will hear idioms the rest of their lives, so enhance their cultural savvy by helping them understand some common ones.

For instance:

• don't count your chickens until they're hatched

• once bitten, twice shy

• don't make a mountain out of a molehill

• make hay while the sun shines

• lots more right here

Then ask for volunteers to act out their favorites. The rest of the class should call out "Break a leg!"

If you'd like your kids to work out some idioms on paper, we've got a worksheet for that in our printables set.

DIRECTIONS

Ask the kids to be perfectly quiet and identify the type of silence they’re creating. Is it an expectant hush, a nervous tension, or merely a lull in the laughter?

Then ask them to describe the way they feel in the silence that follows these moments:

• you’ve just woken up, and it’s still dark outside

• your mom or dad has just called you by your full name, in a serious tone

• it’s been pouring on the roof of your house, and the rain very suddenly stops

• you’re in a parking lot, and you hear a screech of brakes

• you and your friends have been laughing so hard you cried, and the last laugh has just trailed off

• you’ve just removed the lid from a gift box, and what’s inside is horribly disappointing

You can choose to have them verbalize or write their responses.

SUPPLIES

• colored pencils

• scissors and glue

• 3-D foam squares (like these)

• magazines for finding letters and words (or a pre-stocked Word Market, shown below, or shopping bags of precut letters for each child (we've got a Word Market label you can use for that)

• pocket folders, if using (we use them to store worksheets)

• copies of the map from the endpapers, printed on blue cardstock – one for each child

• multiple copies of various story illustrations, printed on white cardstock and separated into piles.

To respect the author's and artist's copyrights, the endpapers and illustrations aren't included in our printables set.

DIRECTIONS

Have the kids look through magazines to find letters to form the book’s title. If you’ve pre-stocked a Word Market, or are helping them search, tell the kids to shop wisely – these letters are "used" but have been specially curated by you, and can be had for a synonym or a cliche (or a pun, idiom, or homophone). Kids have fun coming up with this currency.

After they’ve glued the title to the map, tell the kids to choose 2-3 of their favorite illustrations. They should color the pictures, then cut them closely and attach them to the map with the 3-D squares to make them pop out.

While the kids work, you might show them these clips about the author and illustrator, Milo’s BFF Tock, and the obnoxious Humbug.

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We celebrate Norton Juster in this project, too, by recreating his title. Doing so with mismatched letters bought at the “Word Market” lets kids experience a key scene.

SUPPLIES

• glue

• scissors

• pencils

First, to make this a drawing AND "wording" activity, have the kids cut up the title letters in our printables set (or from magazines), and mix them up.

If it's easier and more fun for your learners, you can cut up the letters ahead of time and stash them in bags for each child, labeled with the Word Market label in our printables set.

DIRECTIONS

1. Ask them to make as many words as they can from those letters, keeping a list. You can use a timer to pick up the pace, or let them take their time. (Sorry, Tock!) You can turn it into a contest, or let it be a thoughtful exercise.

2. When they're done with that wordplay, have them glue the letters  at the top of our template (or a piece of white card stock) to correctly spell the title.

3. Finally, have them emulate a favorite Jules Ffeifer's iilustration under the title. Here's a video we made to help walk your kids through that process:

You might want to also give the kids 2-3 minutes to draw an idea not  pictured in this book. What would Jargon say and do? What would Nostalgia look like? Here’s a list of abstract nouns for more ideas!

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Read the description of the Dodecahedron in Chapter 14, then tell the kids they get to make one that will say at least twelve things without speaking a word!

SUPPLIES

• scissors and tape (tip: ear off tape strips ahead of time, and line them up on the edge of a table or desk)

• colored markers

• expressions to copy, included in our printables set

• the dodecahedron template is in our printables set

DIRECTIONS

1.  First, talk about the definition of dodecahedron. Tell the kids that dodeka is Greek for twelve. (You can break this down further by pointing out that duo means two, and deca means ten, as in decade.) Hedron comes from the Greek for “the face of a geometric solid.” A dodecahedron, then, is a twelve-faced geometric solid.

2.  Next, talk about the different expressions the Dodecahedron wore. Ask the kids how many they can name beyond happy, sad, and angry, then ask them to draw twelve faces on the template form. (Here are some examples, if they need prompting. There's also a sheet of cartoon expressions in our printables set.)

3.  Have the kids carefully cut out the whole shape, being careful not to cut off the tabs. This part can seem kind of daunting, but it’s doable if they take it slowly!

4. Fold the tabs back and bring each pair together, then tape across the front (on the outside). The taping will be easier if they work with a partner – one holds the two edges in place, the other does the taping.

Here's a little video you can show the kids:

When they’re finished, tell them to practice making (with their OWN faces) each expression they’ve created! Our kids had fun rolling their dodecahedrons like dice, then trying to replicate the expression that landed “face up”.

Averages are so useful for figuring out what to expect, or how to plan ahead!

For instance, let’s say Milo is throwing himself a “welcome home” party, and wants to serve all-you-can-eat juice popsicles. He’s going to invite all 20 of his classmates, but he knows some kids might not eat any, some might eat one or two, and a few might eat a LOT more than that. He’s asked his five cousins how many juice popsicles they would eat if they got the chance, and he’s written down their answers. 

All YOUR kids have to do is give the cousins some silly names, add up the total, divide by 5 to get an average, then multiply that average by 20 classmates to find out how many popsicles Milo should freeze for his classmates.

Tips

We've got a worksheet for doing this word problem, in our printables set.

To make this word problem more sensory, bring it to life by serving popsicles when it's finished!

You can discuss the narrative arc in any of these three ways; we've found the first to be the most engaging, because it breaks up the discussion into bite-size chunks.

1. Introduce the concept of the narrative arc up front, but save the story's scenes to discuss as you go, pausing to "do what the characters did" in fun hands-on ways, while weaving in discussions and other worksheets.

2. OR introduce the concept and complete the worksheet before the activities, so kids have a review of the story fresh in their heads first, and you can remind them "where we are" on the arc as you go.

3. OR at the end of your activities, introduce the concept, then help kids figure out where the different parts of this story fit on it.

The narrative arc worksheet in our printables set summarizes the story by plot point, and has kids fill in some blanks.