Hello, Robots! by Bob Staake

Hello, Robots! by Bob Staake

Rating: 3.5 stars

Another good one by Bob Staake.  Here's a tale of four hard-working metal robots who have four different jobs around the house.  They happily do what they're programmed to do all day long.  (I'll take Zip, the cleaning robot, please.)  Halfway through their day, they are all outside when it starts to rain.  They get drenched and go haywire.

Enter a very giggle-worthy page: The baking robot is baking a birdhouse in a tree, the fix-it robot repairs an apple pie, the gardener robot rakes the window glass, and the cleaning robot shines a mound of grass.  As you can imagine, these things are pretty funny to little ones.

Blink, he bakes an apple pie. / Zinc repairs a birdhouse high.
Blip, he rakes a mound of grass. / Zip shines up the window glass.

In order to fix each other, they switch heads!  Funny images help out the funny concept...and the frowns from the metal robots turn to smiles as they go back to their normal tasks, the right way.  They end up smiling bolt to bolt, despite the miscolored, mismatched heads.

My kids are not robot-obsessed (yet?) but we like robots.  Mostly because my husband's one and only dance is the "robot dance," which you can imagine gets rave reviews.  Normally not the goofy type, he cracks up Lorelei and Ben and Kiefer with his moves.  They of course love to join in, doing their best impersonation of Daddy but also doing their own version.  They become "Lo-bot" and "Ben-bot" and "Kief-bot."

And me?  "Mom-bot," of course!

(If you're an educator or librarian or super-over-achiever parent, click here for cute storytime idea.)