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READY! SET! 100TH DAY!

Minna tries out lots of ideas for celebrating the 100th day of school, but none seems just right. With her little brother,...

Minna the rabbit is back, and this time she is trying to come up with a creative idea for her “Ready! Set! One Hundred!” project.

Minna tries out lots of ideas for celebrating the 100th day of school, but none seems just right. With her little brother, Pip, she makes 20 groups of fives with Popsicle sticks. Finding inspiration on her art shelves, Minna uses 10 different paper punches to make 10 groups of 10. Next, she and Pip use five different colors of pom-poms to make groups of 20. Minna’s mom helps her with paper-clip groups of 25, and her dad helps with two piles of 50 using shaped pasta. But not one of these is unusual enough to suit Minna, so she decides to use all of them. The result is an imaginative collage for Minna and a seek-and-find counting exercise for readers. Backmatter pictorially summarizes the different groups Minna made and lists the sets she used in her final picture so readers can check their answers. Wallace’s artwork, rendered in cut paper, photographs and colored pencil, nicely mirrors Minna's creative process. Children will have no difficulty practicing their skip counting, thanks to the clear layout of the sets.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-7614-5956-9

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Marshall Cavendish

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011

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ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

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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A BIKE LIKE SERGIO'S

Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on...

Continuing from their acclaimed Those Shoes (2007), Boelts and Jones entwine conversations on money, motives, and morality.

This second collaboration between author and illustrator is set within an urban multicultural streetscape, where brown-skinned protagonist Ruben wishes for a bike like his friend Sergio’s. He wishes, but Ruben knows too well the pressure his family feels to prioritize the essentials. While Sergio buys a pack of football cards from Sonny’s Grocery, Ruben must buy the bread his mom wants. A familiar lady drops what Ruben believes to be a $1 bill, but picking it up, to his shock, he discovers $100! Is this Ruben’s chance to get himself the bike of his dreams? In a fateful twist, Ruben loses track of the C-note and is sent into a panic. After finally finding it nestled deep in a backpack pocket, he comes to a sense of moral clarity: “I remember how it was for me when that money that was hers—then mine—was gone.” When he returns the bill to her, the lady offers Ruben her blessing, leaving him with double-dipped emotions, “happy and mixed up, full and empty.” Readers will be pleased that there’s no reward for Ruben’s choice of integrity beyond the priceless love and warmth of a family’s care and pride.

Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on children. (Picture book. 5-8)

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-7636-6649-1

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Candlewick

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

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