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2nd out of 8 books
—
2 voters
Two Bad Ants
The three-time Caldecott medalist tells the tale of two ants who decide to leave the safety of the others to venture into a danger-laden kitchen.
Hardcover, 32 pages
Published
October 24th 1988
by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
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This story follows the journey of some worker ants who discover some crystals that they want to take back to their colony for their queen. After the journey, two of the worker ants decide to stay behind so they can eat all the crystals they want. However, they soon learn that this place is not so safe for them and after being battered and bruised, they are saved when the other worker ants return for more crystals.
This book introduces the concept that it is not necessarily a good idea to stray aw...more
This book introduces the concept that it is not necessarily a good idea to stray aw...more
Title: Two Bad Ants Written and Illustrated by: Chris Van Allsburg Genre: Contemporary realistic fiction Age Level: 4 and up grade level p Date: October 1988
The ant scout goes home with a strange crystal; the queen of the ants decides it is the best thing she ever tasted. So the ants wanted to make the queen happy and set off on a journey to get as many of these crystals for the queen as possible. The ants do a great deal of traveling to get to the crystals. Their journey leads them to a kitchen...more
The ant scout goes home with a strange crystal; the queen of the ants decides it is the best thing she ever tasted. So the ants wanted to make the queen happy and set off on a journey to get as many of these crystals for the queen as possible. The ants do a great deal of traveling to get to the crystals. Their journey leads them to a kitchen...more
Sep 20, 2012
Staphany Ramirez
added it
The Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg is a tale of two ants. They left with selfish reasons. In their journey they realize that their new world wasn't what they expected at all. In the end this story has a great message to give out to to the readers. The bad ants realize that in order to be really happy that they need to return home with their mother, who appreciates them. In this book the illustrations are crucial. The images give vivid details that the text cannot show. For example, the illus...more
Overall, i thought this book was interesting. However, i thought that the story line was not so much as boring but pretty basic. I thought the pictures were what actually brought the story to life. Though the pictures are not drastically creative they are simple and very different than the art in other books. I think this book would be perfect for children who are either in the third or fourth grade because it would allow their imaginations to work. This book is about ants and how their ant fami...more
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When an ant scout returns with a huge crystal, the queen indicates this is the most delicious cube of sugar she had ever tasted. The other ants decide that must go find more of these crytals in order to make the queen happy. The journey that they were going to have to endure was going to be a dangerous one. The find thier way to a land in which they had never been before, the human kitchen. They had found the a bowl full of the delicious crystals and they hurry back to but they didnt notice two...more
This book was cute. It talked about the dangers that can be found in an every-day home while also exploring the concept of feeling small. This is something that many children might associate to. A wishing to ignore the rules that our parents set forth. I think that labeling the ants as "bad" associates a negativity to wishing to be independent. While this is a good thing for young children. However, I think that learning from mistakes is what is important as young people for us to experience.
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This story had such a great message at the end of it! The bad ants realized that in order to be truly happy (and safe) they needed to be at home where they were needed and appreciated by their mother. This whole book was filled with vivid personification and description of these two bad ants and gave much insight as to what their feelings were at every given moment. I'm positive this book would be loved by most if not all children because ants are something that they see mostly every day and the...more
Chris Van Allsburg tells a tale of two ants that decide to leave their colony behind for new and selfish pleasures. But in this new world, the ants are forced into unpleasant situations that leave that grateful to return home to their family. The illustrations of this story are very important to the understanding of the ants experience. The images give details that the text is unfamiliar with because it is told from the perspective of the ants. In the story there is reference to disks, a cave an...more
Throughout the entire story, Two Bad Ants is displayed in from the view-point of a worm, which gives the reader the effect of what it is like to be an ant and see the way that they do on a daily basis. Each picture also provides the reader with the illusion of a rough and bumpy effect. The contour of each line plays a huge factor throughout the book as each one provides a whole new look on what is going on on each page. A lot of the time, the way the pictures are shown also requires the knowledg...more
After discovering a seemingly magical crystal, two ants are sent on a quest to return more of the crystals to the hive. These two ants find themselves inside a strange world with no grass, no sky, and powerful fountains coming out of shiny metal tubes. They find themselves inside a human home. This strange new world is initially quite exciting to the ants. They find themselves inside a container of sugar and decide that they never need to return home. The ants quickly find themselves being poure...more
“Two Bad Ants” is a unique little book by Chris Van Allsburg, author of “Jumanji” about how two ants learn the hard way about the consequences of disobeying your elders. “Two Bad Ants” is definitely a book about danger that will excite children for a long time.
Chris Van Allsburg has done a terrific job with both the illustrations and the story as he makes the story as dramatic as he can. Chris Van Allsburg’s story is exciting and intense at the same time as he makes it seem that the story is be...more
Chris Van Allsburg has done a terrific job with both the illustrations and the story as he makes the story as dramatic as he can. Chris Van Allsburg’s story is exciting and intense at the same time as he makes it seem that the story is be...more
Chris Van Allsburg's Two Bad Ants was a creative story that to me lacked visual appeal. The cover of the book is rather dull and boring with an unattractive tanish brown color that gives off an unappealing vibe. The nonwrap around cover provides a somewhat small illustration with a picture of two ants that we assume to be bad. The illustrations contained within the book are rather simple but satisfying. The color scheme does not contain any trully bright colors and are kind of dull just as the c...more
Unlike most of Chris Van Allsburg’s books that I’ve read, I really enjoyed this one! I thought that it was perfect for younger readers. I really like how the illustrations were done and the author makes it clear that they are just as important as the text. It really helps you to understand and get a clear image of the story when you pay attention to the picture on each page. I love how the book was written to personify the ants so dramatically. Allsburg did a great job of using detail to make ev...more
Thank you for reminding me about this. I am not a fan of Van Allsburg, but I do recall enjoying this a lot. As I've mentioned before, any book that gives small children a perspective from an even smaller being's pov is a likely hit. Think The Borrowers and The Littles and The Indian in the Cupboard for older kids, Thumbelina and The Snail House for those into picture-books.
Who would have known the story of two ants in a kitchen could be so interesting? I really enjoyed this book from the very beginning when it had me wondering what those mysterious crystals were that the ant had brought home. Then some of the ants make the journey back to where the one found the crystals, two of them decide to stay back and find themselves in a world of trouble just for these crystals. I think Chris Van Allsburg was trying to view the world from a different viewpoint, that of an i...more
An ant lives in a different world than us and this book gives the perspective of the ants. There is an ant that gets a crystal which is a piece of sugar and the queen likes it so much. All of her kids go on a journey to get more of these crystals. The crystals were from a house and this place is something very weird to them. Two ants stayed behind thinking they could live their lives here where all the treasure was. They were glad with all the crystals they had, but when morning came they were s...more
Two Bad Ants is told from the perspective of the ants. You follow them on their dangerous and long journey for the queen through the text and the illustrations. This book is a perfect example of how you can’t have text without the illustrations or illustrations without the text in some picture books. Each part of the story brings you into the world of the ant to help you understand what the ants are experiencing in the new world they are venturing into. It shows how the simple everyday human thi...more
This book was very sweet, and had a good message at the end. In the beginning, the two bad ants decided that they wanted to be independent and tried to steer away from the colony and do whatever they wanted to do. However, once the two ants get into this "new world" they realize that it's not all what it is cut out to be. The ants get into situations that they almost don't escape, and they soon wish that they had never left the colony. When they finally do return back to the colony, they don't e...more
Two Bad Ants is a home-away-home structures story of two ants' adventures in a "foreign land." The illustrations have an interesting format that seems somewhat contradictory to me. Many of the illustrations are double page spreads, but they are all bordered. It was a little bit distracting to me that the picture was cut in half by the gutter AND the border. I'm not sure that having the middle border accomplished anything that would have been missed by just having the illustration span both pages...more
Two Bad Ants is a portrait style book. It has borders in all the pages and the text is at the bottom where the white is. I think the text is separate from the picture because they want us to be focused on the picture first and then just on the text. This book has many points of view. In some pages you can see it's in a bird's-eye view, like when they are marching out into the "woods". You can also see that in some pages it's a worm's-eye view, like when they are getting into the house from the w...more
Sep 19, 2012
Ashleigh Smithers
added it
Two bad ants was a very different book. I am not sure if I enjoyed the book or not. I did not find the storyline to be interesting and kind of weird. The ants were an interesting way to put that even though you sometimes are bored your home is always safer then somewhere new that you do not know. I thought how he put the storyline was an interesting why to put it. The pictures in this book are very different from his other books, they seem to look more like sketches instead of actual pictures. A...more
I wasn't sure how much my niece would like this book, considering the muted color-scheme, but I needn't have worried. She loves this book! It was fun to watch her little mind be blown by the idea of seeing every day objects like toasters and grains of sugar from the viewpoint of tiny, tiny creatures with no human frame of reference. The moral was nice, but the real joy of this book for me was watching her consider everyday objects from such a foreign viewpoint.
Edited to add: I also enjoyed the...more
Edited to add: I also enjoyed the...more
Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg is a story of 2 ants who go on an adventure from there normal lives and run into some trouble along the way. The colors used in this book are very simple, dull colors. This took away from the excitement of the book but went along with Van Allsburg’s style of having more mature looking picture books. Each picture was surrounded by a white border which made the artwork look more professional rather than comical. Below the illustration on each page was the books t...more
This story was extremely entertaining; it made you want to keep flipping the page to see which household object the ant would come in contact with next. The illustrations have borders, giving the feel that the author is telling a story about an ants journey. The colors used in the illustrations are very dull and the drawings lie heavily on the use of lines. The pages are vertical which works well with many of the drawings-helping the grass and other objects appear much taller and the ant to appe...more
Now I have added all the books by this author that I still don't own (rexcept one). I love this author and illustrator. Even better than Anthony Browne. The Polar Express by Allsburg is the very best children's Christmlas book existing. Adults will love it too. If you don't have it - get it. Each of my kids and I have a copy of the Polar Express, it is that good. I really don't like Jumanji all that much, so I did not add Zathura which seems to be a follow-up. Everybody can make mistakes, even a...more
"Two Bad Ants" is different than the other Chris Van Allsburg books I read. In this one ants are used as the main characters and not humans. The point of view is from the ants and to them humans are considered aliens. In the illustrations thick lines are used which creates detail and movement. The text is simple and placed at the bottom of the pages creating no interruptions from the illustrations. On each page the illustartions are surrounded by white borders. The strong black lines in the port...more
This became one of my favorite Van Allsburg books only recently. I had the opportunity to meet him and listen to him describe the inspiration behind a few of his books, one of them being this one. He said that he was inspired to write this by an encounter with two ants in his own kitchen. He said that he wondered about what the two of them had gone through to reach that spot on his counter shortly before he smushed them with a newspaper, and it brought about the book. It's really a well told sto...more
Just by looking at the cover I was bored. I thought this was going to be an educational book about ants and what they do to survive. Something like what I would see on the Discovery Channel. However, the more I read the book the more I became interested. You know how when you're little you constantly think about what it would be like to be born as a insect or animal? Well this is what I thought about because I have always wondered what it would be like to be an ant. The illustrations were intere...more
Two bad ants is a fantastic story. From a 30,000 foot view, it seems like a story about ants that infest a house and go back home. But as you go through the pages you really feel placed in the ant colony and as one of the ants on the adventure. It’s a story of an ant colony that finds a crystal that the queen loves and wants more. So she sends that ants out to bring some back. The ants head out in this vividly depicted walk to get the crystals, which is sugar, at the house where they found them....more
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| Chris Van Allsburg: 1 | 1 | 7 | 20 fév. 19:23 |
Chris was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan on June 18, 1949, the second child of Doris Christiansen Van Allsburg and Richard Van Allsburg. His sister Karen was born in 1947.
Chris’s paternal grandfather, Peter, owned and operated a creamery, a place where milk was turned into butter, cream, cottage cheese, and ice cream. It was named East End Creamery and after they bottled the milk (and made the ot...more
More about Chris Van Allsburg...
Chris’s paternal grandfather, Peter, owned and operated a creamery, a place where milk was turned into butter, cream, cottage cheese, and ice cream. It was named East End Creamery and after they bottled the milk (and made the ot...more
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28 mai 22:17