This celebration of school spirit is sure to get the energy flowing.
This raucous read-along brings school spirit to every moment of the school day.
A diverse group of young students enter the school building, some looking excited, some worried or sad. The book’s text starts up a chant: “We say BOOK, you say BAG… / Book! Bag! Book! Bag!” The narrative continues with chants about familiar school sights, from nametags to the lunch line, “Alpha! Bet!” to class pet. These call-and-response chants alternate with rhyming couplets about school behavior: “Taking turns and standing tall. / That’s the spirit. Let’s PLAY BALL.” Students find seats, have circle time, play, share, learn together, and create a sense of school spirit as they go through their day from drop-off to pickup. The irresistible rhythm of this chant will have a participatory storytime up and running quickly. The type highlights the words to be chanted, so young readers can see the participatory lines as they arise. The illustrations use bright streaks of color and generous white space to match the energy of the text, and the depiction of diverse humans is refreshing in this season’s animal-heavy list of school stories. Character details offer opportunities for children to notice and guess what some of the children may be feeling. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
This celebration of school spirit is sure to get the energy flowing. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-10832-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Safe to creep on by.
Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.
In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.
Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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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
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