Mrs. McBloom, Clean Up Your Classroom!
Kindergarten-Grade 2–Mrs. McBloom is retiring after 50 years of teaching, and it's time to clean up Room Five for her successor. But that's easier said than done. The classroom has become an ecosystem with trees and animals coexisting peacefully with odd mittens, sneakers, and piles of books. It's a magical mess. Eventually, her students arrive at a solution, and the whole town lines up to select one thing each from the clutter. The resulting yard sale makes enough to send the woman away on the fancy-shmancy cruise she had always wanted to take. The artwork'sMAD Magazine-style characters are not very appealing, but the wealth of strange objects to be discovered on every page will engage readers' interest. Owls, woodpeckers, chipmunks, and hens that knit are ensconced with art projects, dinosaur fossils, playing cards, and baseballs. The room gradually grows more cluttered from the day Mrs. McBloom starts out in her '50s-style clothes (pictured in black and white), long before that Armstrong fella set his tootsies on the moon. The story is told in a folksy voice with a rollicking rhythm and rich phraseology. DiPucchio's language will stretch readers' understanding of the different ways that people can turn a phrase, with such expressions as eye-poppin', heart-stoppin', higgly-piggly, and smack-dab sprinkled throughout the text. And kids will relish the idea that adults, too, sometimes need to clean their rooms.–Jane Barrer, Washington Square Village Creative Steps, New York CityCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.