An entertaining look at starting a new school and some foundational parts of speech.
Pattison’s picture-book story about the first day of school is told almost entirely via nouns and adjectives.
The story, like the title, begins with a frown as a child, Jo (who has pale skin and brown hair), gets off the bus on a very rainy day. Down a long, long hall and through a tall, tall door is Jo’s brand-new classroom. The one friendly child there, Bo (who has tan skin and brown hair),shows Jo the ropes, helping through classes and lunch. When they make it to recess, Jo begins to smile; when two sneaky verbs intrude into the narrative and are sent home by a referee (“Verbs! No Verbs! Red card!”), Jo and Bo both laugh. Jo helps Bo with some spelling, and soon the day is over. Jo nervously waits for a parent to show up until Mom finally appears. Pattison’s text is optimized to get the most meaning across with the fewest words. This approach means the story relies heavily on Joven’s illustrations to move the action forward (especially since verbs are not allowed). The accessible vocabulary and the digital cartoon images match perfectly in tone, and Jo’s anxiety about being new is very relatable. The design elements for the text are also helpful for emergent readers: Nouns are primarily written in blue, adjectives in black, and the verbs are in hot pink.
An entertaining look at starting a new school and some foundational parts of speech.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781629443409
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Mims House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions.
Ellis, known for her illustrations for Colin Meloy’s Wildwood series, here riffs on the concept of “home.”
Shifting among homes mundane and speculative, contemporary and not, Ellis begins and ends with views of her own home and a peek into her studio. She highlights palaces and mansions, but she also takes readers to animal homes and a certain famously folkloric shoe (whose iconic Old Woman manages a passel of multiethnic kids absorbed in daring games). One spread showcases “some folks” who “live on the road”; a band unloads its tour bus in front of a theater marquee. Ellis’ compelling ink and gouache paintings, in a palette of blue-grays, sepia and brick red, depict scenes ranging from mythical, underwater Atlantis to a distant moonscape. Another spread, depicting a garden and large building under connected, transparent domes, invites readers to wonder: “Who in the world lives here? / And why?” (Earth is seen as a distant blue marble.) Some of Ellis’ chosen depictions, oddly juxtaposed and stripped of any historical or cultural context due to the stylized design and spare text, become stereotypical. “Some homes are boats. / Some homes are wigwams.” A sailing ship’s crew seems poised to land near a trio of men clad in breechcloths—otherwise unidentified and unremarked upon.
Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6529-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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