THE TWELVE DAYS OF SPRINGTIME

“On the twelfth day of springtime, / my teacher gave to me / TWELVE flags for flapping, / eleven stones for stepping, / ten words for rhyming, / … / and a garden to water carefully.” One increasingly frazzled teacher leads her class through a variety of activities, some specifically seasonal, some not, to the familiar tune. The humor’s all in Armstrong-Ellis’s illustrations, which depict a rambunctious, multi-ethnic classroom full of kids and their valiant teacher, who is no Ms Frizzle. Each page turn shows her eyes getting wider and wider behind their horn-rims as her kids take every activity she presents them and turn it into happy chaos. Readers will get an enormous kick out of seeing what they do in each busy spread, and they won’t care if the scansion sometimes stutters. (Picture book. 4-8)