Pet Ban! No Frogs in School by A. LaFaye

Bartholomew Botts loved pets.

Bart's room at home is a messy menagerie melee! He has dogs, several species of poultry, a caged canary, a tortoise in his drawer, a cat curled up in a fishbowl, and a fish in an aquarium. He's even got barnyard denizens, two goats, a pig, chicks, and a bunny, and a green snake lives in his bedside table.

So it's no surprise that when he starts to school, he takes a pet along to his classroom.

Bartholomew plopped Ferdinand the frog in his cool pink lunchbox.

But that day, while their teacher is showing his class how to mix secondary colors in art, Ferdinand hops into Lacey's paints and lands with a splat on Mr. Patanoose's head. Face-painting is not in his lesson plan--and Mr. Patanoose proclaims a new school rule.

"No frogs in school!" he declares.

Still, Bartholomew has other pets to take to school with him that are NOT frogs. But on Tuesday Sigfried the salamander goes woo-woo on the teacher's shoe, and he rules out all amphibians at school. On Wednesday Bartholomew brings Horace the hamster, definitely a mammal, along, but his speedy scurrying turns Mr. Patanoose's class into mess of squealing, chasing kids. Rodents are banned for Bart, but he still has Sylvia the snake to take along on Thursday, and when she slithers up toward the ceiling, the group goes wild!

Mr. Patanoose doesn't look happy.

"No more of YOUR pets!" he declares.

Not since Mary brought her little lamb to school has a classroom had so much fun with pets, and the literal-minded Bartholomew finds a way to liven up show-and-tell day with a pet for the whole classroom, in A. LaFaye's No Frogs in School (Sterling Books, 2018). It's a fun first week of school, with the author deftly working in a bit of biological vocabulary, while artist Eglantine Coulemans' illustrations visually extend the text and outdo the cuteness quotient in her comic line drawings of the lanky Mr. Patanoose, his vivacious and varied preschoolers, and charming critters mixing it up. Kirkus Reviews adds, "Each page lends itself to an energetic seek-and-find storytime that promises new discoveries upon multiple reads."