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. 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. This will have wide natural appeal for readers who know some words by sight and are looking to tackle a few that are a bit more complex (“supposed” “landscape” “portrait”) and for established fans of Ruzzier’s picture books.Ī fun, simple, yet sophisticated collection about a friendship between two very different characters. Interspersed throughout are wordless panels in which the vividly colored, soft-edged pen, ink, and watercolor artwork tells the story. Some of the understated humor may be missed by the youngest readers, but the simple, repeated phrasing and dialogue featured in word balloons will keep them engaged. Then Chick questions Fox’s habit of eating vegetables rather than the more common diet of small rodents, frogs, and (gulp) birds in the second, “Good Soup.” Finally, in “Sit Still,” Fox tolerantly paints his way through an afternoon of what is supposed to be antsy Chick’s sitting for a portrait, only to emerge in the end with a landscape. In the first, title story, Chick invites a bevy of animal friends into Fox’s bathroom to swim and play. Through the use of panels that vary from four to a page to double-page spreads, this lovely early reader has the feel of a graphic novel, allowing its clever stories to move easily across the pages. Irrepressible Chick and his laid-back pal Fox star in three illustrated stories for new readers.
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