I love the simple reality of the story. Nothing out of the ordinary happnes to Alexander, it's just "one of those days", as the old saying goes. Having had one or two days like that myself, I can totally understand Alexander's wish to just pack up and leave it all behind (though my usual statement is: "I'm going back to bed and not getting up again until it's a new day."), and his choice of Australia is especially appealing during the long Michigan winters! The message of this story is also something that I need to be reminded of from time to time: everyone has bad days and changing one small thing (where you live) isn't going to prevent them.
This book is one of two (yes, I've narrowed the list to only two) that I make sure to teach, or at least read to my class, every year. Of course my go-to lesson plan (read here common-core friendly excuse for teaching) for this book is synonyms, but I hadn't covered compound words with my newest students this year and I wanted to be sure to intorduce the concept to them. It turns out that this book is full of compound words! Since I hate worksheets, and my students hate worksheets, I didn't want to have yet another worksheet. So how to teach compound words and theme it for Alexander? I thought of the motions and chant that I use: "Take one word (hold out left hand), take two words (hold out right hand), and smash them together (clap hands loudly and interwine fingers) to make one new word (hold up index fingers together to make the number one)." My conclusion was to use the shape of something that's made of two parts, but nothing came to mind. My next thought was a two piece puzzle and the simplest shape I could think of was the outline of Australia. Hence the Compound Words with Alexander activity was born. My students had a great time putting the pieces together and it was a great pre-activity for using my compound word building flashcards later in the week.