Not for beginners, but older children may use this as a springboard for their own shape hunts.
Howells give familiar shapes both personalities and back stories in her authorial debut.
Everyone at Shapeston Elementary is excited about the auditions for the upcoming play, especially the shapes. They’ve had lots of practice playing roles and doing jobs already. Each of the six—Triangle, Square, Circle, Rectangle, Rhombus (aka “Diamond to her friends”), and Oval—gets his or her own double-page spread to serve as an introduction, cleverly pointing out to kids the many places they can find shapes in the everyday world. “Maybe you saw [Triangle] strutting her stuff on that sailboat in the bay.” “[Diamond] dazzles in patterns—check out your uncle’s argyle socks.” The right-hand pages of these intros present montages that show many of them in action: Circle as clock face, Rectangle as tablet screen, etc. Some of the real-world applications are clearer than others (the frosted green Diamond-shaped shortbread feels entirely arbitrary, for instance), and for Square’s help with math, children may need the picture to make the connection. In the end, everyone gets a part, and the shapes play integral roles in the scenery. Howells’ digital artwork is bright and colorful and clearly shows the many places shapes can be found. However, her text is far too long for any audience that is just learning about shapes, and the play is a rather weak device.
Not for beginners, but older children may use this as a springboard for their own shape hunts. (Math picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55453-743-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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