TEACHER!

Having spotlighted law enforcement in Police! Hurrying! Helping! Saving! (2008) and firefighting in Firefighters! Speeding! Spraying! Saving! (2007), Hubbell moves on to another community helper. Rhyming couplets introduce a primary-grade teacher who teaches letters and numbers, keeps kids safe on the playground and shares songs and books. Speir’s bright acrylics depict a multiethnic classroom full of all the right impedimenta (computer, chalkboard, reading corner) and presided over by a white, bespectacled, pixie-cut woman. All in all, it’s a perfectly unexceptional and pretty curriculum-savvy introduction to the genre, and it will likely adapt well to use in preschools. It’s too bad, though, that neither author nor illustrator chose to break the stereotype just a teensy bit. (Picture book. 3-5)