A touching gift for any teacher who’s made an impact.
On our best days and our most challenging ones, teachers are always there to help.
A young student with light brown skin reflects on the twists and turns of the school year and expresses gratitude: “Thank you, teacher, / for everything you do.” The gym teacher helps students feel brave, the art teacher shows patience (and maybe a little exasperation) with a particularly chatty group, the librarian hosts a book drive, and the music teacher encourages students to rock out. Throughout the year, vibrant, buzzing scenes depict detailed scenarios, some joyous, like a multicultural holiday celebration, others filled with anxiety or frustration, such as a poignant spread depicting a distressed teacher reading a newspaper story about book banning. Jewel-toned, mixed-media collages lend warmth and depth to each scene. The spare text is enhanced by the characters’ simple but expressive drawn-on cartoon faces. Teachers and students are portrayed with an array of skin tones; one child wears a head wrap, and another uses a wheelchair. The book reads like an ode to educators everywhere, marked by moments that are at once specific to one child’s classroom experience and universal to students everywhere.
A touching gift for any teacher who’s made an impact. (thank you, teachers!, how to write a thank-you letter, thank-you letter template) (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780374392208
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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