The Magic School Bus Gets A Bright Idea: A Book About Light

Magic School Bus TV Tie-Ins

by Joanna Cole, John Speirs (Illustrator), Nancy White (Adaptation)

Ms. Frizzle's class thinks the PTA light show is pretty wild, but really surprising things happen when the show is over. Ms. Frizzle and the Magic School Bus arrive just in time to help solve the mystery and teach about the properties of light.

Genres: Science, Picture Books, Childrens, Art

32 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Joanna Cole, who also wrote under the pseudonym B. J. Barnet, was an author of children’s books who teaches science.

She is most famous as the author of The Magic School Bus series of children's books. Joanna Cole wrote over 250 books ranging from her first book Cockroach to her famous series Magic School Bus.

Cole was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby East Orange. She loved science as a child, and had a teacher she says was a little like Ms. Frizzle. She attended the University of Massachusetts and Indiana University before graduating from the City College of New York with a B.A. in psychology. After some graduate education courses, she spent a year as a librarian in a Brooklyn elementary school. Cole subsequently became a letters correspondent at Newsweek, and then a senior editor for Doubleday Books for Young Readers.

Reviews

[Lita]

This book is another wacky adventure with Mrs. Frizzle and her class. This time the magic school bus gang are learning about light. Included in this book is how fast light travels and how light can be reflected off of certain objects.

[Sarah Wilson]

My kids enjoyed this book. The magic school books are fun and educational for them. They were especially interested in the experiment in this one. But they wanted to try to make themselves look like ghosts as in the book and that's hard to do at home.

[Peyton]

A magic school bus book that deals with light.

[K Morlando]

We love the magic school bus series of books, they are very educational!

[Himanshu Sharma]

Really fun way to teach kids

[Dolly]

Our girls just adore these Magic School Bus books and we read every one we can get our hands on. I learn some from them as well, and despite the predictable plots and corny dialogue, I enjoy reading them with our girls. And even if our girls don't retain all they've learned, they love the story and I'm often surprised by the bits they've remembered.

This book teaches about the properties of light and even adds a bit of suspense with a ghost story. I enjoyed listening to our oldest read this book aloud to us. Our girls love this series and all of the characters seem like old friends to us.

[Angela Hutchinson]

The famous Magic School Bus series is educational and fun to read. In this book, the kids and Ms. Fizzle take a journey through a theater and learn about light and how it is projected. The kids travel through a funnel to help illuminate the theater so they can find their friends who seemed to be lost. But their friends were not lost, but trying to play a trick on them to make them think the theater was haunted by ghosts. This book would be good for students who are interested in science or when teaching the students about light and how it travels.

[Rosa Cline]

Magic School Bus books are nice "Science' books without being in the readers face about Science. In this one they learn how light is 'made' what you need to make light. What causes reflections and shadows. And they even turn her own trick back on Arnold's cousin Janet, who always thinks she's better than the class.

[Cassie]

The class learns about light.

[Cws]

JEAR3-Col