The 100th day of school has never looked this diverse.
Miss Mingo and her kindergarten class of animals are back, this time celebrating both the 100th day of school and one another’s amazing capabilities.
In mid-February, it’s time to look at the students’ 100th Day projects, and they are as varied as the students themselves. Hippo’s mom has brought his born-yesterday sister, who weighs 100 pounds; Octopus has brought 10 groups of 10 shells each from his octopus’s garden; Koala shares their teddy bear collection, which is ironic because Koala is not a true bear but a marsupial. As in the previous titles, Harper shares fascinating factoids about each species in a small font: “House centipedes can travel 15 inches (38 centimeters) per second. That’s like a person running 58 feet (18 meters) in a second!” As the presentations continue, Alligator, stressed out, asks to go next and shares 100 seconds of deep breathing to relax everyone. Harper’s cartoon illustrations highlight the class’s enthusiasm and emotions. Though many pages group items to facilitate counting, not every 100 is countable: Centipede’s legs aren’t all in the frame, and Pelican’s project is the fact that this bird dives “into the ocean from 100 feet in the air.”
The 100th day of school has never looked this diverse. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0491-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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