We began with our lightning round trivia which is a great way to refresh everyone on the plot and details of the book. Everyone did incredibly well; I am always so impressed with all the small facts kids can remember. The hardest trivia question was: "What book did Michael K. have to read in reading group?" You would have needed to be reading very carefully since it was only mentioned once. Respond in the comments if you can remember!
After trivia, while enjoying our snacks, we discussed many different facets of the book beginning with our first impression of the main character, Michael K. We agreed that he seems like a shy kid, the type who enjoys video games and playing on the computer. A couple of members thought he has a very strange haircut. Overall he is a regular kid, someone who we might know or see at school.
We talked about differences and how easy or difficult it can be for people to accept things that are new and different. Jennifer and Bob are both very different from the other kids at school and we felt that many of the teachers and students at P.S. 858 were not accepting of them and jumped to conclusion about them being from Bulgaria.
We decided that if we ever met an alien from outer space we would ask it some of the following questions: what it's phone number is, whether or not there is animal life on it's planet, where exactly it lives, if it wears shoes, if it knows if there are other worlds out in space like our own and if it has pets like we do.
In the story, Bob and Jennifer need to recruit 3,140,001 people to become SPHDZ or Earth will be turned off. What would that look like? We decided that if Earth were turned off it would not have any electricity, it would become a Black Hole, there would be no people here (we would all either die or freeze), SPHDZ would also die since they need Earth and Earthlings to exist and there would be no oxygen.
Bob and Jennifer talk in commercial taglines because they learned about people by watching TV. We decided that for the most part commercials do not provide an accurate representation of Earth and the people who live here. Commercials often make it seem as though anything is possible which is not always the case. They tend to portray everything at it's best which is also not true to life.
We agreed that Michael K. had the best idea about turning kids into SPHDZ because kids are more willing to believe in things that may seem unreal and are more open-minded that adults. In addition to creating a SPHDZ website and Major Fluffy's blog, we thought he could increase his recruiting efforts by also creating flyers and posters and posting to Facebook and Twitter. Another idea was to create logos for water bottles and to pass them out to kids.
Agent Umber was unanimously voted NOT good at his job and we brainstormed ways he could be a better detective and alien catcher. These included trying harder to not be seen when out investigating, obtaining more gadgets (think Inspector Gadget), doing more undercover work and being more careful of his surroundings and taking necessary precautions (think the incident where he fell out of the tree while spying).
We do not think that Agent Umber will ever catch an alien or get a cool color name however on the off chance he does we thought he might want to consider the names Agent Black, Agent Neon Yellow, Agent White, Agent Aquamarine and Agent Camouflague.
Overall we really enjoyed Spaceheadz and many of us expressed interested in reading on in the series.
Following our discussion we made our own SPHDZ recruitment posters! Everyone did a great job creating posters that will make kids want to become SPHDZ.
It was a terrific meeting and thank to all the new members for coming! See you in October!
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