When the nurse offers some healthy recipes and the students brainstorm a few fun exercises for recess, everyone gets in on...
In her fourth outing, when Miss Fox notices sleepy students, rumbly tummies and huffs and puffs at recess, she realizes that her class needs some help getting into better shape.
When the nurse offers some healthy recipes and the students brainstorm a few fun exercises for recess, everyone gets in on the action—the principal, the custodian and even the kids’ families. Soon the children are giving each other ideas. When Bear tells the class that he can’t sleep after watching Robo-Lobster, his friends list some things he can do instead of watching television. Squirrel shares his healthy snack with Mouse so she won’t eat candy. And it’s not long before Raccoon finds a solution to Frog’s sleep troubles. All the hard work pays off on Field Day, when Miss Fox’s class comes in first, but even better is the increased energy and good feelings they all have enjoyed because of their efforts. As in earlier installments, Miss Fox’s students embrace change almost too easily to be believable, and Spinelli glosses over the difficult work that goes into changing habits. Kennedy’s cast of anthropomorphized animals is comprised of an appealing range of emotions and attitudes, while the endpapers give readers a few more ways to get into better shape.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8075-5171-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Young readers will clamor to ride along.
Like an ocean-going “Lion and the Mouse,” a humpback whale and a snail “with an itchy foot” help each other out in this cheery travelogue.
Responding to a plaintive “Ride wanted around the world,” scrawled in slime on a coastal rock, whale picks up snail, then sails off to visit waters tropical and polar, stormy and serene before inadvertently beaching himself. Off hustles the snail, to spur a nearby community to action with another slimy message: “SAVE THE WHALE.” Donaldson’s rhyme, though not cumulative, sounds like “The house that Jack built”—“This is the tide coming into the bay, / And these are the villagers shouting, ‘HOORAY!’ / As the whale and the snail travel safely away. . . .” Looking in turn hopeful, delighted, anxious, awed, and determined, Scheffler’s snail, though tiny next to her gargantuan companion, steals the show in each picturesque seascape—and upon returning home, provides so enticing an account of her adventures that her fellow mollusks all climb on board the whale’s tail for a repeat voyage.
Young readers will clamor to ride along. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8037-2922-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales.
The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) upgrades to The Mice and the Rolls-Royce.
In Windsor Castle there sits a “dollhouse like no other,” replete with working plumbing, electricity, and even a full library of real, tiny books. Called Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, it also plays host to the Whiskers family, a clan of mice that has maintained the house for generations. Henry Whiskers and his cousin Jeremy get up to the usual high jinks young mice get up to, but when Henry’s little sister Isabel goes missing at the same time that the humans decide to clean the house up, the usually bookish big brother goes on the adventure of his life. Now Henry is driving cars, avoiding cats, escaping rats, and all before the upcoming mouse Masquerade. Like an extended version of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), Priebe keeps this short chapter book constantly moving, with Duncan’s peppy art a cute capper. Oddly, the dollhouse itself plays only the smallest of roles in this story, and no factual information on the real Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is included at the tale’s end (an opportunity lost).
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales. (Fantasy. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6575-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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