Starting School

A: Starting School
B: Franzeska Ewart
C: Leonie Shearing
D:Parragon Publishing
E: Realistic Fiction/Picture Book
F: preK-K, maybe 1st

This is a story about a little girl, Sadie, and a little boy, Sam, who are just now starting school. Sadie is very excited but Sam is pretty nervous about the whole school thing. They get there and have to say their first goodbyes to their parents and go inside the classroom, they put their stuff away and do puzzles and paintings, etc. They get introduced to the class pet, a gerbil named George, Sadie is very excited about having a class pet. They get to play on a playground, which was just fantastic because it was huge and had lots of games for the kids to play. They do music and movement exercises, learn to write simple words and write numbers and at the end of the week one of the children get to take George home. Sadie is so excited, she hopes that she will be the one that gets to take him home, and it turns out that she is the lucky one to take him home first. On Friday while the children line up to go home Sadie tells Sam that she likes school and he agrees with her.

This book is one that is not really for sheer entertainment, it talks about something that every child goes through, separation anxiety and the fear of new things as well as excitement. Most children are afraid on their first day of school and this book shows them that other children are as well and that it is very likely that they are going to have a great experience at school, even though it might seem very scary. I think this would be a great book for a parent to read to their children before they have to go to school for the first time. I would not consider this a great book by any means, it is more of one that I would suggest to parents to read to their children before they come to school and not really one I would keep in my classroom. This was a book that my mom let me borrow so it is nothing that I have ever heard of before. The book was alright, it was not outstanding by any means but it was still informative and it would be worth a read to a five year old who is about to go to school for the first time. ( I also could not find any illustrations from this book when I searched on Google.)