Martha Blah Blah

Data Management

Martha Blah Blah by Susan Meddaugh, Houghton Mifflin, 1996

Summary from School Library Journal (as retrieved from Amazon.ca)

When Granny Flo inherits the company that makes the alphabet soup that enables Martha to speak, the woman immediately fires 13 of the 26 pasta letter makers for the sake of bigger profits. The elimination of these letters from the soup makes Martha's speech hilariously unintelligible. When the quick-thinking dog learns of the cuts from Alf Abbot (unemployed pasta man "A"), she uses her smarts to convince Granny Flo to put the missing letters back in the cans. Each brightly colored page is filled with the zaniness and dialogue balloons of the previous books. Older children will enjoy all the alphabetic wordplay and figuring out the missing letters with the help of the author's footnotes. Great fun!---Maura Bresnahan, Topsfield Town Library, MA

• Write a sentence without using certain letters like the letters A and N.
• Play HANGMAN with a partner.  Take turns guessing letters in each other's words while avoiding having a hangman drawn.
• In the game of Scrabble™, players use letter tiles to form words and earn points. The table below shows the number of tiles available in Scrabble™ for each letter in the alphabet. The total number of non-blank tiles is 98; 2 blank tiles can be used as any letter.  Is the frequency of each letter in Scrabble™ about the same as its frequency in the sample given in the Complete Solution? What are the biggest differences you notice? How would you construct a “better” set of Scrabble™ tiles? How would you assign point values to each letter that represents letter frequencies?