The Analogy Behind The Boy
The Kingdom of John is an engrossing tale of a once happy kingdom pillaged by rebels. The adventure follows a child through their cancer journey using fairytales to explain difficult topics related to the sickness. This book is not delineated through the eyes of the little boy, but represented by his cells. The Kingdom of John is a metaphor for John’s body, and the inhabitants of the vast land are John’s cells. We explain the cell cycle and the cell functions as we would explain a human 's life. The audience for this story ranges from four to five year olds who, with the help of John, can understand how they developed cancer in a captivating way.
The story opens with the villagers communing in the square and doing their normal duties. The first two pages of the Kingdom of John represents how happy the residents of John are and how normal cells are supposed to act. In the next page we begin to describe the daily functions of a cell and start to introduce the cell cycle. Page five demonstrates how cells or the citizens of the kingdom contribute in many ways. For example, making food for the Kingdom exemplifies the ribosomes of the cell creating proteins and the protecting of John imitates the functions of the cell membrane.
After explaining the purpose of cells we describe the checkpoints of interphase using
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As a group we made sure to introduce the black knights as one of their own people so that they would not be thought of as foreign bodies. The depletion of food supplies and the destroying of the castle demonstrates how cancer cells affect the body. Next, the metaphor of knights corrupting other citizens establishes how the cancer cells or Black Knights duplicate and spread like tumors. Taking over the castle is equivalent to the mass build up of abnormal cells that is a malignant