Teacher's Pet

The Kids in Ms. Colman's Class #1

by Ann M. Martin

In the first in a new series, Nancy Dawes's second-grade search for a best friend happily ends on Ms. Colman's class Pet Day when she meets a new classmate, who comes to her aid during a stressful moment. Original.

Genres: Childrens, Middle Grade, Fiction, Realistic Fiction

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Ann Matthews Martin was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. After graduating from Smith College, Ann became a teacher and then an editor of children's books. She's now a full-time writer.

Ann gets the ideas for her books from many different places. Some are based on personal experiences, while others are based on childhood memories and feelings. Many are written about contemporary problems or events. All of Ann's characters, even the members of the Baby-sitters Club, are made up. But many of her characters are based on real people. Sometimes Ann names her characters after people she knows, and other times she simply chooses names that she likes.

Ann has always enjoyed writing. Even before she was old enough to write, she would dictate stories to her mother to write down for her. Some of her favorite authors at that time were Lewis Carroll, P. L. Travers, Hugh Lofting, Astrid Lindgren, and Roald Dahl. They inspired her to become a writer herself.

Since ending the BSC series in 2000, Ann’s writing has concentrated on single novels, many of which are set in the 1960s.

After living in New York City for many years, Ann moved to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where she now lives with her dog, Sadie, and her cats, Gussie, Willy and Woody. Her hobbies are reading, sewing, and needlework. Her favorite thing to do is to make clothes for children.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/annmma...

Reviews

[April (Aprilius Maximus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

BOOK #19 READ FOR BELIEVATHON ROUND 2.

I reread this book for my rereading childhood favourites video!

representation: characters of colour (characters illustrated as being black).

★★★

This is definitely meant for the younger end of middle grade, and because of that it doesn't really hold up reading it as an adult. I'm sure it's super valuable reading it as a young kid (I used to freaking LOVE these books), but rereading it now is just kinda pointless haha. I did love how we got to see Ms Coleman teach though!

[Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not the target audience for this series bit I am going back and rereading BSC and the various spin offs and gave this one a shot. I was happy at first because yay no Karen Brewer who's the worst in this series overall. But unfortunately toward the end she shows up. She does stand up to a bully so props for that. The story is basically about pets and getting a class pet. At first they vote for a rabbit which ticks me off since I have rabbits and they are not a kids pet and as they are active in the evenings the poor guy would be stuck in a cage when he wanted to run. Half the class votes for it and the kids get a lesson in democracy life isn't fair kids and you don't always get what you want. Ms. Colman is a pushover and is like oh no everyone has to agree. Karen, ugh, comes into the class and they decide on a guinea pig. It wasn't a bad read, quick for sure but do we really need Karen here too? Oh well at least they're quick so I don't have to read too much about her.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

I always wanted to read this series as a kid, so I was really excited to see all of the books available on Hoopla.

Sadly, though, I didn’t really enjoy it. It was super juvenile but I was expecting it to be so I can excuse that. But everyone seemed way out of character, and it was just not an interesting story.

I may or may not read more of these just to see if they get better, but not planning to anytime soon.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute. Good to see the POVs of Karen's classmates, and also a pre-Karen story.

[Lolo Onda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this with my class (though it is severely out of date) and my students were sadly uninterested. One big reason for the general disinterested stemmed from the numerous different characters and their use of first and last names. I think my students had a really hard time trying to keep track of who was who throughout the read aloud. The first book kind of turned me off from reading any of the rest in the series.

[D.L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was today year's old when I found out Ann M. Martin had written a spin-off series to the Little Sister books. Karen Brewer annoys a lot of BSC fans, I've heard, but she's actually grown on me over the years so I like reading about her adventures in whatever form they take. She doesn't appear much in this book though. We get more POV about her BFFs Nancy and Hannie and the other kids in Ms. Colman's class at Stoneybrook Academy. This is a very short but cute little story. It's not earth-shatteringly brilliant or exceptionally original but it's comforting, kind of like a bowl of warm mac n cheese on a cold afternoon.

[Partridge Public]

Martin, Ann M. PB

[Twyla · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite part was when the class picked there pet for the class.there was no worst part or character.the best character was the teacher