MRS. TOGGLE'S BEAUTIFUL BLUE SHOE

``Overcome by spring,'' the ever-childlike Mrs. Toggle (Mrs. Toggle's Zipper, etc.) leaves the papers on her desk to join her class in kickball. When she misses the ball, her shoe sails into a tree (where, in Alley's ingenuous watercolors, a pair of birds seriously consider it as a site for a nest). True to form, principal Mr. Stickler turns up to chide the teacher for setting a poor example (``one shoe off and one shoe on'') and suggests some wonderfully silly means of retrieval, like luring it with food, that would be a lot more appropriate to his cat; also true to form, Mr. Abel the custodian eventually gets the shoe down with his ladder. Simple and, by now, predictable; still, disarmingly lighthearted and funny. (Picture book. 4-8)