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. The story’s slight but allows kids to practice identifying and dealing with their own big feelings.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 29.6% of actual size.) There’s a rainbow of skin tones and hair colors as well as abundant variation in hair texture, several children exhibit visible disabilities, including one child who uses a wheelchair, and there are markers of religious and cultural diversity. But, as with its predecessor, its strength is again the diversity on display in its pages. As a guide for dealing with feelings and problem-solving, the book is a bit slim and lacks a solid story to hook readers. This book’s refrain is “How can I help? / What can we do?” And the answers, spread over several pages and not spelled out in so many words but rather shown in the illustrations, are: talk it through, compromise, and see things from another perspective. But therein lies the rub: What should the something new be? While the exact nature of the disagreement is unfortunately not made clear to readers, the big feelings that the children exhibit are very clear (and for readers who need practice reading facial clues, there’s a labeled chart of 15 in the frontmatter). The diverse group of kids from All Are Welcome (2018) this time gathers in a vacant lot with tools in hand to clear the debris and make something new. Penfold and Kaufman team up again to show children how to navigate overwhelming feelings.

Big feelings penfold