The Night I Flunked My Field Trip

May 10, 2004
A nautical class outing goes awry in Hank Zipzer: The World's Greatest Underachiever #5: The Night I Flunked My Field Trip by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver, illus. by Carol Heyer. When Henry and his class head to Manhattan's South Street Seaport to learn the ropes on an old sailing ship, Hank inadvertently sets the ship out to sea.

December 1, 2004
Gr 3-5 -Another book featuring the dyslexic, list-making fourth-grader. Hank's class is scheduled to spend the night on The Pilgrim Spirit, a tall sailing ship docked in New York Harbor. He boards with the other students and soon learns that his nemesis, Nick McKelty, has tricked him again by nominating him for a job that involves a lot of cleaning for the mean and gruff captain. When Hank is learning knot tying, he accidentally unties the ship and they are soon adrift with a captain and first mate who are actors and know nothing about sailing. Hank, his friends, and his grandfather help to make for a happy ending. Although this book stands alone, fans of the series will enjoy spending more time with Hank and his cohorts. While the humor sometimes seems forced, the story has just enough details about dyslexia to attract those who have this learning disability and instill empathy in those who don't.-Debbie Stewart Hoskins, Grand Rapids Public Library, MI

Copyright 2004 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

fabbeauty - I read this book about a thousand times on one of the school kindle, it is the first Hank Zipper I ever read, its pretty good. Its about this guy called Hank Zipper and he is a guy who always forgets and he doesn't have much knoledge in his brain, so the first problem was that on that friday he was going to go to a field trip on a boat except tied to shore! But then, he forgot his permission slip. The second problem is that he and this guy Collin was suppose to practice tying knots, so Collin was reading the instructions and Hank was figuring out what to do but Hank didn't understand the instructions but he didn't tell Collin because he didn't want to get embarresd so when Collin got cold and went to get his jacket Hank went to some other knot and quickly tried to tie that knot but he kept on messing up and he couldn't put it the way back so he just let it there. At night Hank woke up and figured they weren't tied to the shore anymore and he remembered what he did at day time.... This experience gave Hank a great chance to be a leader.