Free Mr. Granite Is from Another Planet! by Dan Gutman Page B

something!” Then she went running out of the room.
    Emily is weird.
    â€œAt night,” Mr. Granite told us, “you can see over a thousand stars with your naked eye.” *
    Everybody started giggling because Mr. Granite said the word “naked.” Any time anybody says “naked,” you have to giggle. That’s the first rule of being a kid.
    â€œNow,” Mr. Granite said, “let’s learn about Uranus….”
    Everybody giggled again. It’s hard to learn stuff when your teacher keeps saying words like “naked” and “Uranus.”
    After a while my legs started to feel tired. Riding a bike isn’t nearly as much fun when you’re just staying in one place and learning stuff. I started to pedal slower.
    That’s when something weird happened. The lights went out. Suddenly, the class was dark.
    â€œEEEEEEEEKKKK!” screamed all the girls, as if they’d never been in the dark before.
    â€œWho turned out the lights?” Michael asked.
    â€œYOU did!” said Mr. Granite. “You need to pedal faster!”
    We all started pedaling faster, and the lights went back on.
    â€œKeep pedaling!” shouted Mr. Granite.
    I thought I was gonna die!

4
Going Green
    Boy, Mr. Granite wasn’t kidding about making Ella Mentry School green. Everybody was doing their part to save energy and help the environment.
    Miss Lazar, our school custodian, put solar panels up on the roof to collect the sun’s rays and turn them into electricity.Miss Lazar is bizarre!
    Ms. Hannah, our art teacher, hates throwing stuff away. She told us to bring in plastic bags from home instead of throwing them in the garbage. She showed us how to make plastic bags into butterflies, kites, and dream catchers. Ms. Hannah is bananas!
    Mr. Docker, our science teacher, is off his rocker. He has a car that runs on potatoes instead of gas. Mr. Docker converted the school bus to run on potatoes, too. And he helped Mrs. Yonkers, our computer teacher, to hook up potatoes to power the school computers. So now she says that “PC” stands for “potato computer.” Mrs.Yonkers is bonkers!
    Mrs. Cooney, our school nurse, brought a giant tube of toothpaste to school one day. It was about the size of a first grader! Mrs. Cooney is loony! She said that when you buy large sizes of stuff, you don’t have to go shopping so often. There’s less waste, and you save money, too.

    Ms. LaGrange, our lunch lady, told us to pack our lunches in reusable containers instead of in paper bags so we’d have less garbage. She also brought in a bunch of cows to graze on the grass in the field behind the school. Now the lawn doesn’t need to be mowed anymore. And we get free milk, too!
    I don’t know where Ms. LaGrange got the cows. I guess she went to Rent-A-Cow. You can rent anything. Ms. LaGrange is strange.
    Mrs. Roopy, our librarian, read us a book about how trees give off oxygen (which is good stuff) and absorb carbon dioxide (which is bad stuff). Then she helped us plant a tree in the middle of the library. Mrs. Roopy is loopy!
    And Mr. Klutz, well, he put up a giant windmill in the field behind the school. When the wind turns the blades of the windmill, it makes electricity.
    The whole school was going green! Part of the reason was that we all knew it wasgood to save energy and reduce waste. The other part was that we all like chocolate cake.
    â€œDo any of you have other ideas to help the environment?” Mr. Granite asked us while we were pedaling to nowhere.
    Little Miss I-Know-Everything was waving her hand in the air like she was trying to signal a boat across the ocean. But Mr. Granite called on me instead. So nah-nah-nah boo-boo on Andrea.
    â€œI know a way to save energy,” I said. “You should close the school down and let us stay home all day. Then we could sit around and do nothing. That would save a lot of energy.”
    Everybody laughed even