While the story itself seems simple, the concepts are pertinent to several important social issues such as bullying and racism, as well as understanding point of view.Ĭharming characters, a clever plot and a quiet message tucked inside a humorous tale.Genre and Theme: Lyrical verse fiction talking about the basics of anatomy and overcoming hypochondria.Īnnotation: If all of my parts fall off, will their be anything left? Cartoon-style illustrations in ink and watercolor use simple shapes with heavy black outlines set off by lots of white space, with an oversized format and large typeface adding to the spare but polished design. The story is told effectively with just a few words per page, though younger readers might need help understanding the size and perspective concepts. In the end, they decide they are all hungry and trudge off to eat together.
Eventually, these brightly colored animals learn to see things in a different way. Tiny, pink critters then float down by parachute, further complicating the size comparisons. This is followed by a show-stopping double-page spread depicting two huge, blue legs and the single word “Boom!” in huge display type. The purple creature maintains that the orange creature is “big” the orange one counters by calling the purple one “small.” This continues, devolving into a very funny shouting match, pages full of each type of creature hollering across the gutter. 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.įuzzy, bearlike creatures of different sizes relate to one another in an amusing story that explores the relative nature of size.Ī small purple creature meets a similarly shaped but much larger orange critter. 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 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 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. Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
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