Junie B. Jones Is a Graduation Girl

Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones Is a Graduation Girl is a very funny school story for 8 year olds about a girl who cannot leave her new white graduation gown in its box.

What happens

Junie B. has just turned six and is extremely pleased about it. The presents included a tool belt in her size and her very own plumbing supplies for fixing the toilet, which tells you most of what you need to know about her.

Then her mother reminds her that she graduates from kindergarten on Friday, and the jumpy feeling starts.

The worry underneath the book is a real one. A boy called Paulie Allen Puffer has been telling everyone that next year will have completely different children in it and all their classmates will be weirdo strangers. He has also said their brains and feet will double in size. Junie B. has no way of knowing which of these is true.

That is the whole appeal really. You get the actual size of things from inside a six year old. A diploma is thrilling until you worry it might turn out to be clothes.

She is also gloriously bad at stopping herself. Her teacher asks the class for a rhyme for blue, and Junie B. stands on her chair and supplies a poem about feet that smell like stink, and then she is sitting on the blue chair outside the office again. The bit where she hides her face in her knees so people cannot recognise her is perfect.

Her headmaster is lovely with her, by the way. She tells him her behaviour has shown considerable improvement, pronouncing the words very carefully because they came off her report card.

Two things for a British family. This is American kindergarten and first grade throughout, so it is roughly the end of Reception. And Junie B. talks in deliberately wrong grammar, which is the joke rather than a mistake. The book even makes it a plot point, with her proudly reciting ran, thought and threw to prove she has stopped saying runned and thinked. Some parents love it and some find it grating, so it is worth reading a page before you decide.

There is nothing upsetting in it. The stakes are a gown, a poem and a diploma.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, there is a whole year after it. Junie B. Jones, First Grader (At Last!) picks her up in a new classroom with a teacher who has a mustache and a girl next to her called May who she does not care for at all.