My three sons, now teenagers, (and I,) were fortunate to have been introduced to this book by their first-grade teacher...and it brought us together for some very enjoyable reading! These poems are just downright funny, in the most innocent and slightly ornery way! My oldest son became an instant fan of Jack Prelutsky, and was even inspired to make up his own poems! Marylin Hafner's illustrations are just right to complement Prelutsky's poems--she captures the essence of each poem! You (uh, and your children!) will most assuredly enjoy this book!

After only a few reading, my 3yrs old daughter fills in the sentences as I read the glibe and rhytmic text. The synopsis says "sure to be embraced by boys"; do not let this misguide you from purchasing a fun and mischievious book.

My son always chooses this book at the library. He's not yet two years old and he loves looking at each animal, making their noises, then finding each animal in the final panoramic picture. The drawings are engaging -- the zebra prances, the rhino smiles, the leopard is utterly relaxed but thoughtful. (Only the lion doesn't look quite proportional with real lions, but he looks wise and a little mean.) He'll be getting his very own copy for his 2nd birthday!

I love this book. I read it as a child and have adored it ever since. People have described me as "macabre" and "twisted" with a cynical sense of humor but I don't think that's the case here. This book is witty and hysterical. Grown-ups deserve to have "childish fun" without actually having to read children's books. While a child certainly could read this book, adults can appreciate it even more! All you adults who want to have fun, Read this book! It is a laugh RIOT!

Like most of Barbro Lindgrens books,The Wild Baby Gets a Puppy,can be read by both adults and children and be enterpreted in completely different ways. Maybe children will not realise the depths and the philosphical dilemmas that this book is suggesting. In most of Barbro Lindgren's books,the main theme is to escape from reality by entering your dreams and expanding your mind. In this book the wild baby is dreaming of a puppy for birthday present.When he's finally celebrating his brithday with his mother he sadly finds out that his dream about the puppy would not be fulfilled.Instead his mother gives him a puppy made out of cloth,in his anger and dissapointment the wild baby tries to shoot the dog with his wooden shotgun... But at the night of his birthday all of his "animals" wakes up and they have all become alive! They leave the house in exitement and admire the moon. And they all agree to fly there .The puppy has grown wings and off they go!The space seems to have a dream planet for all the travellers;for the giraffe, for the rabbit and for the baby.... The book is very symbolical and the way I see it,I think it wants to say that we can not find real fulfilment on this planet,the only way we can experience pleasure and fascination is to enter our own minds,it may not be easy to do so but once we have accomplished it,we will see that our minds are like the space. An endless and utterly beautiful landscape where we can get in touch with our true selves and where we can find our "dream planets". Where the ultimate ecstasies can be experienced. In this space all the compulsions of our society has completely vanished as well as our terms of "time",and I think that is essential in order to experience joy. I highly recommend this book it can be read over and over and every time it's depths will expand.

Hooray!!! The genius of Dr. Suess is teamed with that of Jack Prelutsky and Lane Smith to produce an outstanding book full of rhymes -- and reason. Diffendoofer School is a santuary for individuality. Why take spelling tests, when yelling contests are so much more fun? Everyone in the school has a unique talent they contribute - like Miss Bonkers, who teaches frogs to dance; and pigs to put on underpants! The students and Diffendoofer love its zany outlook, until a test threatens to send them to Flobbertown, where everyone's the same. But Miss Bonkers has faith in her pupils and chirps:

"We've taught you that the earth is round, that red and white make pink. But most importantly of all: We've taught you how to think..."

And when the test comes, it is filled with things they do know. And for the questions they didn't know, somehow they answered them, proving what Miss Bonkers said. This book is a great gift, and proves that a little fun can't hurt! Three cheers for Diffendoofer Day!!!

HIP HIP HOORAY!!!

If only there were a Diffendoofer School! I'd gladly send my children to a school where a sprited teacher named Miss Bonkers makes learning a delightful adventure everyday. ("She even teaches frogs to dance, and pigs to put on underpants.") I purchased this book with great enthusiasm because I was intrigued by the fact that Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel never had a chance to finish the story; only a handful of rough illustrations and verses existed. After Dr. Seuss passed away in 1991, his editor of 11 years, Janet Schulman, passed on the rough draft to Jack Prelutsky (a wonderful children's poet) and Lane Smith (an amazing illustrator with a surreal style). This brave team stepped up to the enormous challenge of fleshing out Dr. Seuss's story.

Prelutsky continues the Seussian tradition of wacky words and rhymes, a delight for the young and old. Children love the hilarious descriptions of all the folks who run Diffendoofer School, from the nurse, Miss Clotte, to the stressed-out principal, Mr. Lowe, whose "face is wrinkled as a prune from worrying so much."

Parents will appreciate the not-so-subtle pun on high-stakes assessment tests. The Diffendoofer kids are positively thrilled when they see that the test has "questions about noodles, about poodles, frogs, and yelling...about other things we'd never seen or heard, and we somehow answered them, enjoying every word." Dr. Seuss, Prelutsky, and Smith have created a book that celebrates the creative mind and the joy of learning.

The illustrations by Lane Smith are touched with a lighthearted surrealism. Each page is cotten candy for the eyes. In a touching and unique homage to Dr. Seuss, Smith included original Seuss drawings in many illustrations. It's fun to simply look at Smith's illustrations and try to remember in which books the Seuss drawings appeared.

Another treat for the Seuss fan comes after the story. Schulman, Seuss's editor, wrote "How this Book Came to Be," which includes many of Seuss's original rough sketches and handwritten text. It's a rare opportunity for one to peer into the mind of a brilliant writer.

I simply love reading this book to my children. Three cheers for Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, and Lane Smith!

This is a book that points out the importance of individuality! We weren't meant to be clones (that's what the students at Flobbertown look like) Miss Bonkers is so very unique and, yes, "cool"! She *is* the teacher that I would love to have! I like the fact that Mr. Lowe really liked Miss Bonkers anyway! I also like the illustrations - that little guy in front of the school is cute. I really appreciate the cameo appearances by the earlier Dr. Seuss characters! I am very glad that the book was eventually put together. It says that it is cool to be yourself! The Diffendoofer students enjoy school and the Flobbertown students appear as if they are at least getting through another day! And Miss Bonkers was teaching them lessons that they could apply! Hooray for this book!

Teachers, this is a poetry book for you to use in your classroom. Being a new teacher, I was fretting about my approach to teaching poetry and making it enjoyable for all my students! I use this book in two lesson plans. In the first lesson plan, I split the class into small groups and gave them a poem to act out for the class. The second, I gave them a poem about an amazing elephant and they had to use the details from the poem to illustrate what the elephant looked like! They enjoyed the lessons tons! I think the key to the success of the lessons was that the poems I used from this book were kid-friendly and funny!

A pizza the size of the sun, has some of the best poems that I have ever read. Although the best one is the main one. It is the pizza the size of the sun. Even though the poems are for younger kids they are great for all ages. If you like poems you should pick up a copy of this book. I recommend this book for anyone who loves poems. Jack Prelutsky could'nt have writen this book any funner.

Jack Prelutsky's A Pizza The Slice of the Sun is the talk of my reading classes! The poems are a terrific way to engage my remedial readers' thinking skills while tickling their funny bones -- even on a bad day! They look forward to the silly, creative ways Mr. Prelutsky looks at life, and often ask for an extra "listening skills" activity just to get to hear another round of silly poems. We often use the Random House Book of Poetry for Children edited by Prelutsky and Lobel as well. Another classic sure to put a grin on everyone's face! Who says poetry has to be boring?!? A definite MUST HAVE for any classroom library!

My three year old son loves dragons, but they also scare him sometimes too. This book is one of his favorites because the poems are fun (like "Nasty little dragonsong" and "I have a dozen dragons", to name a couple) and the illustrations are not scary at all. We enjoy looking at the pictures and he loves to hear the poems. In fact, the poem called "I am boom!" the thunder dragon has made him a little less frightened of thunderstorms. We just say "There's that old boom again!" and he settles down, whenever thunder is rolling overhead. If your child is interested in dragons, this is a great edition to your library. Lovely illustrations and fun-to-read poems.

I took a chance on Jack Prelutsky's gifted poetry and read this book to my son's 2nd Grade class, instead of a run-of-the-mill story. The children were enthralled. They really longed for the world to have dragons again, real or otherwise. Never mind that some of the vocabulary was a bit sophisticated for them (My Dragon's Been Disconsolate), they wanted to hear every poem, not just those I'd selected for them. My son returns to the book to gaze at Peter Sis' whimsical illustrations and read the poetry over again every so often. I peek over his shoulder each time!

We love, love, love this book! The wordplay and the humor are such fun for our primary grade age son and for the parents, too. I find that the poems have insinuated themselves into my brain without my even trying to memorize them -- but I consider that to be a good thing, because these poems are such fun. My son finds "Boom" -- the poem and the illustration -- to be scary and we usually have to skip that one. His favorites are the one about the nasty little dragon and the dragon in my computer; my favorite is the title poem.

I must say, however, that the dragons in the illustrations are not at all the way I picture them, so I found the illustrations disappointing.

I read this book to my nephew and we giggled our way through the whole thing. The poems are quite imaginative. Some are long, others short. All very funny. My nephew is only 4, and he enjoyed picking out the things "that really wouldn't happen." He and I both loved it

Dennis Lee is a treasure. My daughter and I devoured Alligator Pie when she was a little girl, chuckling merrily over author Lee's zany humor and vivid imagery. I have subsequently given each new Lee book to the children (and even some of the adults) I know, happy to introduce this outstanding author to those who haven't yet discovered him. Want to make your children/grandchildren/neighborhood kids laugh out loud? Get them anything Dennis Lee has written. He's truly gifted, truly tapped into the mind of the child in all of us.
My highest recommendation.

I am so glad we checked this book out from the library rather than spend money on it. The "poems" are short and stupid; I cannot believe even a 2-year-old would find them funny. If you live in a major North American city, that city's name might appear in a poem and your child might find that neat; other than that, I see nothing here. Beware, if you have sensitive children who watched the WTC tragedy coverage--the last poem (which is the one the book is named for) is illustrated with what appears to be the Twin Towers.

The rhymes were a bit tricky to read and I'm not sure if my almost-four-year-old understood them all, but she enjoyed the sing-song sound of them, when I didn't flub reading! She liked the illustrations and I did to, as I have a particular fondness for Garth Williams, who has illustrated some great books from my childhood.

Of all the books we read together, and there were many by the time my daughter was enough of an under-the-blanket reader to finish them on her own sometime before breakfast, this one, like few others (Wind in the Willows, Secret Garden, for example) never wore itself out. Ride a Purple Pelican was a trusty cue for wonderful bedtimes!

The back cover shows the splendid and heartbreaking image of a little boy on a silver stork in the sunset above the clouds, with the looming towers of the World Trade Center resolving into beautiful, grey sleep (sixteen years ago).