Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. 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.ĭuncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale. 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. Although the closing pages beg the implied child reader to “please please please please / please / choose a book with pictures” for subsequent reading, it’s likely that this request will be ignored.Ī riotously fresh take on breaking the fourth wall. Nonsense words, silly words to be sung and even a smattering of potty talk for good measure all coalesce in riotous read-aloud fare. Employing direct address, it pleads with the implied child listener to allow him or her to stop reading. Furthermore, the text implies (or rather, demands) a shared reading transaction, in which an adult is compelled to read the text aloud, no matter how “COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS” it is. What this book does have is text, and it’s presented through artful typography that visually conveys its changing tone to guide oral readings. has brown hair and blue eyes,” in order to keep with the book’s central conceit.

The jacket flap even eschews a glossy photo, instead saying “B.J. It doesn’t even seem fair to call it such, since it has nothing to do with his Emmy Award–winning writing for The Office or the fame his broader career has afforded him. Television writer, actor and comedian Novak delivers a rare find, indeed: a very good celebrity picture book. This book may not have pictures, but it’s sure to inspire lots of conversations-and laughs.

The book with no pictures pages