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. proudly enumerates the unique qualities and experiences that could inspire his new name.Īn expertly crafted, soulful, and humorous work that tenderly explores identity, culture, and the bond between father and son. The otherwise-muted palette bursts with color as Thunder Boy Jr. His admiration of his dad is manifest in depictions of Big Thunder as a gentle giant of a man. Morales’ animated mixed-media illustrations, reminiscent of her Pura Belpré Award–winning work in Niño Wrestles the World (2013), masterfully use color and perspective to help readers see the world from Little Thunder’s point of view.

Big Thunder knows that the time has come for his son to receive a new name, one as vibrant as his blossoming personality. So maybe my name should be Drums, Drums, and More Drums!” Little Thunder wonders how he can express these feelings to his towering father.

He muses, “I love playing in the dirt, so maybe my name should be Mud in His Ears.…I love powwow dancing. says his nickname, Little Thunder, makes him 'sound like a burp or a fart.' Little Thunder loves his dad, but he longs for a name that celebrates something special about him alone. The Native American boy is named after his father, whose nickname is Big Thunder.

Thunder Boy Jr. by Sherman Alexie