From School Library Journal
Grade 3-5-Like The Goof Who Invented Homework (Dial, 1996) and If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand (Four Winds, 1990), Dakos's newest collection highlights incidents taken from her teaching days-here, mostly written in the poetic voice of a girl named Penny, who, from the first day of school, realizes that her teacher is unusual. Ms. Roys has a collection of plastic hands, and she takes the class on an overnight to the museum, where they sleep beside dinosaur skeletons. She wears unusual earrings, and has a pencil cemetery. On the 100th day of school, she fills the classroom with 100 helium-filled balloons, each tied to a pencil, marker, crayon, or pen, and she has a magic wand that her students may borrow when they need to think of fresh ideas. The verses vary in length from a few lines to a few pages, and in style from rhyming couplets and quatrains to unrhymed collective poems written in the form of playlets, in a sort of verbatim conversation. Some are funny, some clever, some poignant. Small pencil cartoons decorate almost every page. Students will relate to Dakos's descriptive recollections of incidents throughout a year in one elementary classroom, and they will appreciate her understanding of children.
Susan Scheps, Shaker Heights Public Library, OHCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Gr. 2-5. The author of
Mrs. Cole on an Onion Roll and Other School Poems (1995) offers another collection of humorous and thoughtful poems recounting the school year in Ms. Roys' fourth-grade class. Ms. Roys, who wears toilet bowl earrings, fascinates Penny and her classmates. During the course of the year, Penny and the class take an overnight trip to a dinosaur museum, create poems about dead pencils and snow, and plan the perfect farewell gift for Ms. Roys. Poems range from thoughtful ("When all the children / Go home, / Do the ghosts of the past / Come and sit / At our desks . . . / And remember. . . / When they weren't ghosts?") to the absurd ("We were painting / A mural today, / The frog got loose, / What else can I say?"). Karas' black-line cartoon drawings add a goofiness to the text that children will appreciate; they will especially like his depiction of the eyeballs mentioned in the title poem. A sure-to-be-popular choice for back-to-school and for the poetry shelf.
Kay WeismanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
