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. Côté's illustrations are simple without being cartoonish, demonstrating the same warm understanding of childhood. Fagan believably captures the delicate balance of friendship in the very young and lets the story pay out with welcome complexity. Friends again, the four play hopscotch, using their stones as markers. Feeling guilty and thinking quickly, Ella May rushes into her house and returns with a solution standing for an apology: With a broom and box and bit of ribbon, she fashions a pony for Maya and pulls similar makeshift magic for Amir. Sudden rain washes away Manuel's work, and Maya and Amir again stand disappointed. Both make wishes, for a pony and a moonwalk. He only charges a penny! The stones of Maya and Amir emerge with telltale stripes, like Ella May's. He returns pulling a wagon that holds his "amazing machine" (made of a cardboard box), designed to turn ordinary stones into wishing stones. Nobody stays for lunch, and Manuel calls her mean. All rush to show Ella May, who rejects them. Ella May declares it too special for them to hold they set off to find their own. She makes a wish on it, and it comes true! Friends Manuel and Amir and Maya come to see her new wishing stone. Ella May comes home from the beach with a pretty stone she thinks is magical.
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