The celebration of the 100th day of class is a popular addition to the school calendar, reflected in a recent spate of read-alouds with centenary themes. McNamara (Too Many Valentines, below) joins the centennial bandwagon with this first offering in a classroom-based easy reader series featuring a small group of multi-ethnic first-graders from Robin Hill School. This story features a red-haired girl named Heather who is excited about the planned celebration with each child invited to bring 100 tiny items to school to share with the class. She gathers 100 buttons of all sorts, but then is unable to attend the party because she is sick. The class delays the celebration to wait for Heather’s return, and each child then shares 101 items on the next school day. McNamara’s clever, humorous story is a natural for sharing on the 101st day of school, with opportunities for related math activities (counting, sorting, adding, and learning about time), but it also serves well for children who are just beginning to read simple stories on their own. Gordon’s loose watercolor and ink drawings are full of tiny, humorous details, such as Hannah’s buttons flying all over after she sneezes or 100 spiders escaping from their box on a child’s desk. The Robin Hill School stories will find a ready audience on easy reader shelves in both school and public libraries. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85536-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work.
A young spinach hater becomes a spinach lover after she has to grow her own in a class garden.
Unable to trade away the seed packet she gets from her teacher for tomatoes, cukes or anything else more palatable, Sylvia reluctantly plants and nurtures a pot of the despised veggie then transplants it outside in early spring. By the end of school, only the plot’s lettuce, radishes and spinach are actually ready to eat (talk about a badly designed class project!)—and Sylvia, once she nerves herself to take a nibble, discovers that the stuff is “not bad.” She brings home an armful and enjoys it from then on in every dish: “And that was the summer Sylvia Spivens said yes to spinach.” Raff uses unlined brushwork to give her simple cartoon illustrations a pleasantly freehand, airy look, and though Pryor skips over the (literally, for spinach) gritty details in both the story and an afterword, she does cover gardening basics in a simple and encouraging way.
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9836615-1-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Readers to Eaters
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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