Joseph Slate

On the first day of kindergarten, Miss Bindergarten must prepare her classroom for her beloved students. This noble, whimsical teacher greets her dark, summertime-empty classroom with an explosion of color–a bouquet of fall leaves, a goldfish, rolled-up posters, and shoeboxes full of no-doubt-delightful surprises. Meanwhile, her young students get ready, too: “Adam Krupp wakes up. Brenda Heath brushes her teeth. Christopher Beaker finds his sneaker.” Author Joseph Slate matches each animal character with a letter of the alphabet, and readers can flip to the back to discover that Adam is an alligator, Brenda is a beaver, and Christopher is a cat–and so on, through the more obscure animals such as the quokka and the Uakari monkey. Youngsters will relish the scenes of school preparation, adorned by rhyming text: a mother iguana dragging her son Ian Lowe (who cries “I won’t go!”) out the front door, and the little vole Vicki Densel biting her pencil. And of course Miss Bindergarten is the kindergarten teacher we either remember fondly or wish we had. The final back-to-school classroom scene explodes with love and pride and the smell of freshly sharpened pencils.