Prehistoric Pet Day: Dino Pets Go to School by Lynn Plourde

MY TEACHER SAID
"IT'S PET DAY!
SO BRING YOUR PET
TO SCHOOL TO PLAY.

I BROUGHT A DINO
FOR A PET,
THE TALLEST DINO
I COULD GET.

Well, technically, our little scholar intends to bring his tallest dino to school, but there's a little problem with seating on the school bus involving his long-necked sauroposeidon and some hanging traffic lights along the route.

Oh, well, how about a more compact dino? The loudest dino he knows?

AFTER I MADE THE INTRODUCTION,
OUR WHOLE CLASSROOM NEEDED RECONSTRUCTION!

This show-and-tell pet day is not off to a good start. Our boy tries again, this time with the spikiest dino from his menagerie. Things go well until the class takes a recess and tries to get a soccer game going, and his styracosaurus attempts to make a head pass. The game ends early--but with a BANG!

The boy keeps on trying--with the widest dinosaur (massive damage to the bench in the lunchroom) and the smartest dino, (a troodon smart enough to please the kids by eating the math tests before the quiz)--and the frazzled teacher gives him an ultimatum--"one more try!"

This time the boy has a brainstorm: What kind of dino can't wreck classroom routine? How about a very young one? So he loads a dino egg on his red wagon and hauls it back to school. What harm can a nice, spotted egg do to the school day? Well,....

Lynn Plourde, famous for her hilarious School Picture Day (Picture Puffin Books) has another comic tale of one of those special days at school in her latest Dino Pets Go to School (Dutton, 2011), just in time to kick off Pet Day or the ever-popular prehistoric life unit in your favorite classroom. For teachers or diehard dinosaur fans, Plourde adds to artist Gideon Kendall's paleontologically correct illustrations with her appended "Dino Facts," which identifies each of the class's prehistoric visitors.

See also Plourde's earlier Dino Pets for more funny dino pet disasters.