Punished! by David Lubar

From Goodreads,

"Logan and his friend Benedict run into the wrong guy at the library--literally. When Logan slams into the reference guy in the basement and gives him a little lip, Logan gets punished, really and truly punished. He has three days to complete three tasks before Professor Wordsworth will lift the magical punishment that keeps getting Logan in even more trouble."

Goodreads - Punished!

Awards and Nominations:

• Keystone to Reading Book Award for Intermediate (2009)
• Flicker Tale Children's Book Award (2010)

This past school year I took the time to make multiple projects through Donors Choose which is a website that allows teachers to post projects and ask for supplies all while people around the world can donate money to help.  I posted a project to receive the book Punished! for my students because it would allow us to learn about figurative language.  I was very fortunate that a donor fully funded our project so that we could receive a class set of books.  My students were extremely excited to get the books and even more excited to read them. 

Punished! is told by a young boy named Logan who can be a little unruly at times.  One day Logan and his friend Benedict are playing tag in the library when Logan runs into a man.  The man ends up punishing Logan by making him say puns every time he speaks.  Logan must quickly complete three quests set by the man in order to get his punishment lifted. 

This book is absolutely perfect for teaching figurative language.  This book has a lot of puns, oxymorons, redundancies, anagrams, and palindromes.  The book is split so that a quest takes a chapter or two to complete, but the reader also learns what each of these things are.  While I was teaching using this book I used a unit study I purchased.  It had pages where students had to find the different types of figurative language in the chapter or they had to come up with their own oxymorons.  I think the favorite activity my students did was when we searched for palindromes.  Students were given a sheet of paper and tried to come up with as many as possible.  They sat for probably 15 minutes just working to find different ones.  Our phonics curriculum has letter cards that are located on my board.  My students utilized those and kept referring back to them.  They also applied rules that they have been taught through the phonics such as vowels that are typically doubled in a word such as "ee" or "oo".  The whole activity was a great pull of skills from the book we were reading, from our phonics program, and from basic spelling rules.  The book definitely made my students more aware of things that are used in conversation and I noticed they started identifying the figurative language people were using.  My class even pulled a pun in math using the word isosceles.  From a teacher standpoint this book is a great way to teach figurative language in a fun and engaging way instead of droning on and using worksheets. 

My students liked the book for the most part, but they had two complaints.  One was that the book had a terrible ending.  My students felt like the book ended abruptly with no exciting end.  I have to agree that the book did have a shabby ending.  Once the final quest was complete the book ended swiftly with no exciting twist to it.  The other complaint was that there wasn't a lot of action.  My students said they wanted a book that had more ups and downs with exciting points that left us hanging.  Unfortunately, this book was literally just Logan working straight through to get the punishment lifted with very few issues or problems that caused any sense of excitement. 

All in all, the book was an excellent work to use to teach figurative language.  I plan on using it as long as I stay teaching in my current grade.  The book could use more excitement and adventure, but it does the job on covering figurative language.  I think this book is perfect for use in a classroom.  I give this book 3 stars.