Look Out! A Storm! and Poof! A Bot! by David Milgrim

Stacey Rattner

Stacey Rattner is our guest blogger today. Stacey is the librarian at Castleton Elementary School in upstate New York. She has been running a Mock Geisel project with first graders for the past three years. Stacey also runs a Mock Caldecott and Newbery and Sibert Smackdown. One of the highlights of her year is when she watches the ALA Youth Media Awards live in the auditorium with all her students. You can find Stacey on Twitter @staceybethr @C_ESLibrary or blogging at http://librarianleaps.blogspot.com.

I made an appointment to meet with my friend, Natalia. She was spinning around when she greeted me at the door. Her parents assured me that she was ready to read but warned she might be a little rusty. "No problem," I said as I handed the rising first grader Look Out! A Storm! and Poof! A Bot! both by Geisel honor winning author and illustrator, David Milgrim.

Image courtesy of the author. 
Used with permission.

Olly the rhinoceros is in a bad mood. His friend Otto doesn't know it until he greets him with a big "HI!" (Natalia had fun shouting that!). Oh no! Olly starts chasing Otto right into Flip and Flop. And NOW Flip and Flop are chasing Otto who is running after Olly until...a storm comes. Everyone hops on Olly's back to find cover. They wait the storm out and everyone, including Olly, is now in a good mood.

Natalia needed help with only a few words. The names "Olly" and "Flip" were a challenge at first. She struggled with "storm" but after I encouraged her to use the illustrations as clues, she figured it out. "Now" was difficult but she knew "know" so we had a nice discussion about the differences in those words.

Look Out! A Storm! by David Milgrim

The book teleported me back to 1975 and Mrs. Marcus when I read the repetitiveness of "See Olly go. See Otto go." However, this book is so much more exciting than Dick and Jane ever were. Natalia is proof: "I liked that the storm was cool. I didn't like the chasing part because Olly has a sharp horn and I'm afraid he's going to hurt Otto."

Poof! A Bot! is categorized as a "Ready-to-Go!" reader, one level easier than Look Out! A Storm! The opening pages include all the words in the story. Natalia sped through most of them. The bonus words were, well, rightly labeled "bonus" (ie, eye, mint, pie, tea) but by giving her a preview ahead of time, Natalia was more successful when she read them in the story.

Zip, the alien, zaps a bot. Zip demands his bot to make him some hot mint tea. Instead the bot throws a pie in his eye. "'I see it fly into my eye.' Oh, my." Natalia confidently remarked in her cute 5 ½ year old voice, "Little rhyming words," and then giggled when she turned the page. Zip was mad. His anger backfires and multiplies the bots, each with a pie in hand! Hilarious! Finally, Zip zaps a tea and a pot and together they have a tea party.

Poof! A Bot! by David Milgrim

"Mint tea" slipped Natalia up at first (I thought for sure she would recognize the tea bag in the illustration since her mom is a tea drinker?) "Coffee? Hot chocolate?" Those were really the only words she had trouble with.

"I like the illustrations, especially the baby alien," she said pointing at the page. "And the pie in the eye was funny," she said laughing. "There really wasn't anything I didn't like."

It's no wonder that David Milgrim has won two Geisel honors. He has a knack for writing exciting, funny, page turners for our newest readers. And even though Natalia rated both books 4 ½ stars out of 5 (Does giving a half sound grown up?), I would easily zap these books to the top of any Geisel contending list. Go, David, go!