Spring Sprint! Mr. Putter and Tabby Run the Race by Cynthia Rylant

It was April. Mr. Putter and his fine cat Tabby were feeling their April energy. Mrs. Teaberry next door was feeling it, too. She called Mr. Putter one April morning. "There's a race! A marathon!" she said. "Uh-Oh," thought Mr. Putter. "I don't think I remember how to run. Aren't we too old to run a marathon?"

But Mrs. Teaberry knows how to close a deal.

Mrs. Teaberry told him it was a race for seniors--no one but old people.

"There are prizes," said Mrs. Teaberry. "Second prize is a train set, with lights and tunnels.

Find your sneakers!"

Mr. Putter didn't find training for a marathon to be easy. He spent four days just looking for his sneakers. He tried touching his toes and settled for touching his knees three times a day. Tabby lapped some cream and napped. On the day of the race, Mrs. Teaberry had matching T-shirts that said The Zekers for them to wear. Her good dog Zeke had a jump rope. Tabby had a worried look as they arrived at the track. She and Zeke got on top of the car to watch. Zeke watched. Tabby napped.

"I didn't know there were so many seniors," said Mr. Putter.

"Oh, we're everywhere!" said Mrs. Teaberry.

"Uh-Oh," thought Mr. Putter, as he watched the seniors stretching and touching their toes. The seniors lined up and then they were off. All the runners passed Mr. Putter. Mrs. Teaberry was soon way out front. Zeke got so excited he jumped off the car, and with his jump rope still in his mouth, he ran after Mrs. Teaberry. Some of the seniors tripped on Zeke's jump rope and bumped into other runners; some fell, and some stopped running right on the track to protest having a dog in the race.

But one of them wanted a train set so badly that he ran past everybody.

He grabbed Zeke's rope and hanged on for dear life. Zeke ran fast. This made Mr. Putter run faster.

Mr. Putter and Zeke ran so fast that Mr. Putter won the first prize--a set of golf clubs. Mrs. Teaberry won the train set.

"Phooey!" said Mr. Putter.

Mr. Putter did not want the first prize. But Mrs. Teaberry did, and she promptly swapped prizes with him. And after every round of golf in April, she and Zeke stopped by Mr. Putter's house to watch the new Putterville Railroad stop at the junctions and go through the tunnels.

Mr. Putter had a train hat.

Mrs. Teaberry had a golf cap.

Zeke had his jump rope.

And Tabby had a nap.

You're never too old to share a train set, in the Newbery and Caldecott award-winning Cynthia Rylant's Mr. Putter & Tabby Run the Race (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Artist Arthur Howard's pen-and-ink watercolor illustrations are nothing short of comic genius, as always filling out the gentle and humorous renditions of the familiar characters in this outstanding series of books for beginning readers. Long may Mr. Putter and Mrs. Teaberry share their pets and a cup of tea together.

Don't Look Back! Nothing Ever Happens At the North Pole by Stan and Jan Berenstain



IT’S A BOOK!
A BOOK FOR ME!

I CANNOT WAIT.
TO START MY BOOK.
SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN.
ALL I HAVE TO DO IS LOOK!

SOMETHING HAPPENS
EVERYDAY.
WRITE IT DOWN
RIGHT AWAY!

When a little penguin finds a pristine journa addressed to him in his daily mail, he has to hurry into his scarf and earmuffs and hit the snowscape outside, looking for something interesting to record.

Making tracks across the snow cover, pencil at the ready, he looks for newsworthy events. He trudges up a steep slope, oblivious to the hungry white wolves closing in on him from the rear. What can he write about in this barren view?

A GIANT SNOWBALL
THAT WENT ROUND AND ROUND
AND SMASHED SOME BADDIES
INTO THE GROUND!

But the penguin rejects his snowball, obviously made of inferior snow, and tosses it behind him without a backward look, where, in a scene reminiscent of The Bears' Christmas, it snowballs back down the slope carrying the baddie wolves to a catastrophic crash below.

This device is repeated as the penguin presses forward, still looking for something memorable, trudging over lumpy, sleeping polar bears, who are aroused and angry in his wake.. He hops across ice floes, oblivious to the fact that one of his stepping stones is the head of a testy (and well-tusked) walrus, who chomps down on a floe just as the penquin leaps to land. Finding nothing worth reporting, our little journalist goes under the sea, where he mistakes a waiting whale’s eye for one of the ubiquitous snails on rocks, and surfaces just in time to miss being swallowed whole, still disgusted with his unimpressive environment.

I MUST WRITE SOMETHING!
IT’S ALMOST NIGHT!
THERE’S JUST ONE THING
FOR ME TO WRITE.

IT’S THE ONLY THING
I CAN SAY–
NOTHING HAPPENED
HERE TODAY!

It’s an object lesson in dramatic irony for early readers in Michael and Jan Berenstain’s Nothing Ever Happens at the South Pole (Scholastic, 2012), as the would-be writer, oblivious to everything but what is right in front of his nose, slogs on in search of hot news. The back story of this familiar-sounding but newly published Stan and Jan Berenstain effort is that the manuscript for this book was to be the duo’s second-ever book, but was pushed back by the roaring success of their initial Berenstain Bear title and waited in the archive of the Berenstain basement until, after Stan’s death, Jan and son Mike resurrected and re-worked the original. Fans of the Berenstain Bears will find the typical quatrains less than lyrical but somehow rhythmically reassuring, a quality which made their classic I-Can-Read books so appealing to emergent readers. There’s a rewarding chuckle on each page read as the little penguin returns in disgust to his igloo while all heck breaks out in his wake, making this snowy blast from the past deserving of a warm snow season story hour.

This book has great possibilities as an introduction to journalling for primary students. And for a double dose of dramatic irony, pair this one with the classic Caldecott-winning Ellen Raskin’s Nothing Ever Happens on My Block for a storytime illustrating a similar theme and a similarly oblivious narrator with a very different illustrative style, a literary lesson along with the laughs.