His sister, Lady, has some helpful advice for making a new pal: “You just need to find something you have in common.” Buddy loves the game Robo Chargers and karate. To make matters worse, there is a field trip coming up, and Buddy needs a bus partner. How do you make a new friend when an old one moves away?īuddy (from Sorry, Grown-Ups, You Can’t Go to School, 2019, etc.) is feeling lonely. 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. However, readers may notice tokenism at play since Nigel and his parents are the only brown-skinned characters in the book.Ī poignant story designed to help young readers feel good about themselves and where they come from.
Zhang’s ink, gouache, and watercolor illustrations are charming and thoughtful, effectively capturing both Nigel’s anxieties and his fanciful inner world. Relieved and proud, Nigel finally gains the courage to share his dreams with his classmates. That night, he confesses his fear to the moon: “What if I wish to be too many things?” When his teacher asks the class to share what their parents do for a living, Nigel is ashamed to speak up since his parents “don’t have fancy jobs.” So, he is stunned when his parents make a surprise visit to his class to speak about their careers and prove to be a big hit with the students. When his classmates share their vocational aspirations, Nigel feels shy to admit that he wants to be a superhero. With the moon, “his dreams are safe.” During career week at school, his class goes to the library to read about various occupations, but Nigel does not find any books with dancers who look like him. His desire is to become an astronaut, a dancer, and a superhero. Nigel, a brown-skinned young boy, peers out of his bedroom window and shares his dreams with the moon.
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