Kindergarten Luck by Louise Borden

I have been looking forward to the release of Kindergarten Luck by Louise Borden for a long time.  I received a review copy in the mail from the publisher last week.I love all of Louise's books and we love that she is an Ohio author.

Kindergarten Luck is about a boy named Theodore and his lucky day.  On a gloomy day, Theodore finds a shiny new penny face up and his day goes from gloomy to lucky.  The book follows Theodore through his day in Kindergarten where lucky things happen!  From having great pancakes for breakfast to being line leader at school, Theodore has a great day!  At the end of the book, Theodore pays his luck forward so that his friend can have a lucky day too.

This is a happy book with lots for readers to talk and think about.  It seems like a book that should be in every Kindergarten classroom. It is also great for older kids too when talking about paying things forward and finding those positive things throughout the day.  The illustrations are fun and happy and the end pages are an added piece of fun!

This would be a great gift for any kids in your life who are getting ready to start Kindergarten!

Happy Belated Chinese New Year!

Kindergarten Day USA and China
(A Flip-Me-Over Book)
by Trish Marx and Ellen B. Senisi
A Global Fund for Children Book
Charlesbreidge, 2010
review copy provided by the publisher

Jesse T. Zoller Elementary School is in Schenectady, New York. Little Oak Children's House is in Beijing, China. Kindergarten classes from both of these schools share this book.

Read from one side and you are in kindergarten in the United States: learning to read, coloring, eating lunch, playing with friends at recess, celebrating a birthday, and thinking about China while you practice telling time and look at the globe.

Flip the book over and you are in kindergarten in China: learning to read, coloring, eating lunch, playing with friends at recess, celebrating a birthday, and thinking about the United States while you use your fingers to count and look at a map of the world.

This is a great book for exploring similarities and differences, for comparing and contrasting, for thinking and understanding. It would be fun to do a kindergarten photo essay from lots of different kindergarten rooms in the same school district to see how different things are even when we think they are going to be more the same. What if we compared kindergarten in the city to kindergarten in a rural school? More the same, or more different?

And on the subject of photo essays, wouldn't it be fun to have kids bring in pictures of their bedrooms to compare and contrast? (You know you loved it when we shared pictures of our classrooms...but of course I can't find links to any of those posts...)