The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Front Cover
Express Publishing, 2007 - Easy to read materials - 48 pages
Dorothy is a farm girl from Kansas. She is lonely and dreams of a better place, so she plans to run away. During a tornado she is transported to a land beyond the rainbow where she meets magical characters. After lots of adventures she and her friends are rewarded by the Wizard of Oz and she is enabled to go back home to Kansas. The Express Publishing Showtime Readers is a brand new series of books at four levels, which introduce students to classic children's stories in English, using a unique approach with special emphasis on dramatisation. Students first enjoy the story as a reading text in several two-page episodes with beautiful illustrations. Each episode is accompanied by language activities to help comprehension and consolidate learning. The same story is then brought to life as a complete musical play which students can perform at the end of the school year. Each reader includes a biography of the author, a brief summary of the plot, character descriptions and a picture dictionary. The accompanying audio CDs provide a fully-dramatised recording of both the reading text and the play, together with all songs, incidental music and sound effects. The Teacher's book includes a key to the reading activities, plus the playscript with full stage directions, sheet music and lyrics for all the songs, as well as detailed suggestions about choreography, set design and construction, costumes and more. For classes without sufficient time to stage a full production of the play, there are charming cutout characters to be used in a puppet theatre presentation.

About the author (2007)

Best known as the author of the Wizard of Oz series, Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in New York. When Baum was a young man, his father, who had made a fortune in oil, gave him several theaters in New York and Pennsylvania to manage. Eventually, Baum had his first taste of success as a writer when he staged The Maid of Arran, a melodrama he had written and scored. Married in 1882 to Maud Gage, whose mother was an influential suffragette, the two had four sons. Baum often entertained his children with nursery rhymes and in 1897 published a compilation titled Mother Goose in Prose, which was illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. The project was followed by three other picture books of rhymes, illustrated by William Wallace Denslow. The success of the nursery rhymes persuaded Baum to craft a novel out of one of the stories, which he titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Some critics have suggested that Baum modeled the character of the Wizard on himself. Other books for children followed the original Oz book, and Baum continued to produce the popular Oz books until his death in 1919. The series was so popular that after Baum's death and by special arrangement, Oz books continued to be written for the series by other authors. Glinda of Oz, the last Oz book that Baum wrote, was published in 1920.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Showtime readers
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Virginia Evans
AuthorsL. Frank Baum, Jenny Dooley
ContributorsVirginia Evans, Jenny Dooley
PublisherExpress Publishing, 2007
ISBN1846793459, 9781846793455
Length48 pages
  
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