8543RB Reading for Me Level 6 Part A

Imaginative
My Un-bee-lievable
Day
Most of the time, being the son of an entomological scientist is
somewhat mundane and uneventful. My mum spends her days and
nights studying all species of bugs, from beetles to mantids to
dragonflies, which are her favourite. I think she is in the company
of bugs more than humans.
My day started like any other but it was about to get weird.
I walked home from school like I did every day, as we live one
street away from the local primary school and my mum considered
me responsible enough to navigate my way home safely. As I
went in the front door I called out to tell Mum I was home,
but there was no response. That was not unusual as she would
normally have her head buried in research or be concentrating
her gaze down the lens of a microscope. She was definitely the
stereotypical absent-minded professor and was accident-prone
because she never paid attention to her surroundings.
I went searching for her in the basement, which she had converted
into a state-of-the-art home laboratory, but she was nowhere to
be found. I noticed she had added a new piece of equipment to
her already abundant supply, but this one was a little larger than
the other pieces. It looked like some kind of weird mini-cannon
with a glowing coiled metal end like a nozzle. I turned it around
to get a closer look, when a bright, lightning-like spark shot out
and zapped me in the face. I must have passed out because when I
opened my eyes I had no idea where I was.
I surveyed the room but it felt familiar in an unfamiliar way.
To the right of me was what looked like mum’s lab chair,
but it was at least 100 times the size. Everywhere I looked
seemed like it had been transformed into gigantic proportions,
until it dawned on me that perhaps it was me who had
changed size. I must have zapped myself with a shrink ray and
now I was the size of an insect! Why didn’t my mum warn me
about her newest invention, and where could she possibly be?
I finally heard her voice calling my name from a distance, and then
I was in her arms—her tiny, little bug-sized arms. It seems she was
also playing around with her new piece of equipment and, she being
who she was, accidentally zapped herself into the size of a bug.
‘Hey, what’s bugging you?’ she greeted me with. Trust my mum
to have her bug jokes at the ready in a situation like this.
‘Maybe we need to call in a SWAT team to help us,’ I replied.
I was my mother’s son after all.
‘Well, I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but we better get
ourselves back to normal because being this small is making me
feel antsy,’ Mum said half-jokingly.
60 Reading for Me Level 6 (Part A) 978-1-922843-65-4 R.I.C. Publications ® Prim-Ed Publishing