Fun on many levels, this has a sure spot in classrooms and storytimes as fable, grammar lesson and wordplay all rolled into...
Coffelt masterfully weaves a lesson in words around a familiar "Little Red Hen" moral, making this one entertaining teaching tool.
Monkey needs help transporting his bananas home so he can make banana cream pie. But Ant is a new aunt anxious to see her niece, Bee has too much to do, with a honey shipment due, and Bear must wash the fir sap off his fur. Gnu, Ewe, Horse and Deer also find more pressing matters, and each leaves through the leaves without helping. Just when Monkey is about to do it all himself, Ant comes back to pitch in. They make the pies and share the tasty results. Predictably, the other animals want some pie, too, but Monkey only provides after they all help in the cleaning up. The five homonym pairs and 29 homophone combinations are bolded within the text, making them easy to spot. Coffelt keeps her textured oil pastel illustrations simple, so as not to detract from the wordplay, but what they may lack in detail they more than make up in rich, vibrant color and visual humor. Aunt Ant directs her little army from underneath a purple foreman's cap. Backmatter defines homophones and homonyms and addresses the regional pronunciations that can affect whether or not two words sound the same.
Fun on many levels, this has a sure spot in classrooms and storytimes as fable, grammar lesson and wordplay all rolled into one. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2353-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees.
After Duncan finds his crayons gone—yet again—letters arrive, detailing their adventures in friendship.
Eleven crayons send missives from their chosen spots throughout Duncan’s home (and one from his classroom). Red enjoys the thrill of extinguishing “pretend fires” with Duncan’s toy firetruck. White, so often dismissed as invisible, finds a new calling subbing in for the missing queen on the black-and-white chessboard. “Now everyone ALWAYS SEES ME!…(Well, half the time!)” Pink’s living the dream as a pastry chef helming the Breezy Bake Oven, “baking everything from little cupcakes…to…OTHER little cupcakes!” Teal, who’s hitched a ride to school in Duncan’s backpack, meets the crayons in the boy’s desk and writes, “Guess what? I HAVE A TWIN! How come you never told me?” Duncan wants to see his crayons and “meet their new friends.” A culminating dinner party assembles the crayons and their many guests: a table tennis ball, dog biscuits, a well-loved teddy bear, and more. The premise—personified crayons, away and back again—is well-trammeled territory by now, after over a dozen books and spinoffs, and Jeffers once more delivers his signature cartooning and hand-lettering. Though the pages lack the laugh-out-loud sight gags and side-splittingly funny asides of previous outings, readers—especially fans of the crayons’ previous outings—will enjoy checking in on their pals.
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593622360
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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
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