By Kevin Henkes
A little mouse who adores her long flower name until the other children start school and tease her about it, and one wise teacher turns the whole thing around.
Chrysanthemum thinks her name is absolutely perfect. She loves the way it looks written down and the way it sounds out loud, all the way until her very first day of school. That's when Victoria points out that nobody else is named after a flower, and that her name barely fits on her name tag, and that it has as many letters as she has years. The teasing follows her out the door and home again, and every day she wilts a little more, no matter how much her parents tell her she's wonderful. Then she meets Mrs. Twinkle, the music teacher everyone adores, who is going to have a baby soon, and who says she's thinking of naming that baby Chrysanthemum too. And just like that, the whole class decides flower names are the best names there are.
It hands a room the exact experience of being teased for something you can't change, and then it shows the fix coming from a grown-up who simply values the child out loud. That's why it works cold on the first week of school: it's a painless way to talk about names, teasing, and belonging before anyone in the room has been hurt, and it gives your class a shared story to point back to. Henkes keeps the wound real but small and the ending warm, so even a tender child leaves it feeling safe rather than shaken.