A review by catsobvi
Mr. Klutz Is Nuts! by Dan Gutman

2.0

This series is incredibly formulaic, not that I expected much more from it. Kids like repetition, they like things with which they are already familiar. But where the first book was sometimes funny and frequently educational, Mr. Klutz is Nuts! seemed trite. Using a basic formula to outline a book is fine with me, I read plenty of formulaic series and genres. But replace 'Mr. Klutz' with 'Miss Daisy' and it could almost be the same book. Again, Mr. Klutz offers them a reward for reaching a goal of 1,000,000 [insert educational discipline here]. Again, Mr. Klutz agrees to do something crazy. Again, Andrea the know-it-all is the one to push them over the line to their goal. Again, A.J. hates things. The wording for the jokes is even the same. And I'm not really sure what the point of the story is. Mr. Klutz keeps doing crazy things as incentives for the kids to do something educational. The kids decide he's doing these things because of personal problems, and what he really needs is a hug. I found it kind of weird. My favorite thing about Miss Daisy is Crazy! is that it encourages learning, it shows that it can be fun, it throws in actual math problems and spelling questions and homophones and rhymes and new vocab. Reading it with my kindergarteners, we had fun talking about our own real life math problems and helping Miss Daisy spell words and learning why some words sound the same but mean different things. Mr. Klutz didn't provide us with any of those opportunities.