Team Info:

• Team Name Team 5000
• Sponsor Teacher Stacey Hoy
• Participating students Sophia Aliotta, Hayley McAllister, and Zoe Reed

Summary of The Green Book

The Green Book

The book begins thus: “Father said, “We can take very little with us.” Only one book each.

Father, Joe, Sarah, and Pattie, and lots of other families are leaving a dying earth on one of the last escape ships. They are headed for a far planet that they know almost nothing about, hoping it can sustain human life. Pattie is so young that she will not be able to remember the Earth. But being the youngest, she gets to name the new planet–“Shine,” she calls it, a planet where all the plant life sparkles like glass.

How will they build with mineral-laden wood they cannot saw? How will they survive, when their rabbits die from eating the glassy grass, and their wheat shines like diamonds? How will they build a community–what will be valued, and why? And then, when they meet other living beings, how will they co-exist?

One step they take in building a life together is to share their books. Joe’s copy of Robinson Crusoe is not in great demand (there are multiple copies), nor is Sarah’s copy of The Pony Club Rides Again. Many people would have swapped things for a chance to read Father’s technology book, but he won’t let it out of his sight–he clings to it as his passport toward becoming the new elite of their community. But it is Pattie’s book, the “green book” of the title, that becomes the most important. Its pages are blank, and her older siblings had mocked her choice. But in the end, this is the book that will tell the new story the colonists are creating. It is no longer empty, but “full of writing, very large and round and shaky.”

 Your Content

Challenge 1

Design an invention to help characters solve a problem they encounter in the novel.

We made an invention that can multiply food, so your food bills go way down. Our problem was hunger because it is a very important problem. Pattie and all of the other colonists on Shine had very small rations of food per meal. Our invention is supposed to prevent this.

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