Roscoe Riley Rules 5 – Don’t Tap-Dance on Your Teacher

Katherine Applegate's Don't Tap-Dance on Your Teacher is a short, loud, very funny school story for 8 year olds, told entirely from time-out.

What happens

Roscoe Riley is in trouble again. He tells you so on page one, and then he tells you which rule he broke, and then he explains that he will have to start at the beginning of the beginning.

The beginning is his friend Emma's new tap shoes.

Roscoe collects noisy things. A whoopee cushion. A cowbell. A megaphone that makes him sound like a megamonster with a bad cold. So shoes with the noise built in are the best invention he has ever heard of.

He talks his parents into lessons. He promises, absolutely promises, not to quit this time. He practises in the bathtub, which gives you LOUD taps, and then has to clean the bathtub.

And then he walks into the class and finds out he is the only boy in it.

That is the whole problem of the book, and it is handled beautifully lightly. His big brother has already warned him he will get teased. His teacher has already shown the class a DVD of a brilliant male tap dancer. Roscoe still sits down on the bench and pretends there is a stone in his shoe.

What happens next is the thumping elephant music, which is honestly too good to sit out.

The chapters are tiny, some of them only a few lines long, and Roscoe interrupts himself constantly to explain things to you. He translates his family for you as well. "We'll see" is Parent for "Don't count on it".

There is a bit of teasing about dancing being for girls, from a classmate and from Roscoe's brother, and the grown-ups in the book keep saying plainly that there is no such thing as boy stuff and girl stuff. If your child is being got at over something they love, this one lands somewhere useful without ever preaching.

This is one of a set about Roscoe, and each one is a fresh scrape, so starting here costs a reader nothing.

What to read next

For another child who narrates his own bad decisions with total confidence, Don't Swap Your Sweater for a Dog has Roscoe borrowing a neighbour's clever dog to win a trophy, and immediately regretting what he traded for it.